Why Your 'Fully Utilized' Team is Actually Slow: The Science of Capacity Planning
Your engineering team feels busy, backlogs are full, and everyone's calendar is packed. Management celebrates 95% capacity utilization as peak efficiency. Yet somehow, nothing moves fast. Simple features take weeks, urgent fixes get delayed, and team morale drops despite hard work.
This scenario reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about team performance. Following Q3: The Principle of Queueing Capacity Utilization, high utilization doesn't create speed—it destroys it exponentially.
The mathematics are unforgiving: teams operating above 80% capacity utilization enter an exponential queue region where small increases in work create massive delays. Understanding this relationship transforms how we think about team productivity and sustainable velocity.