3 posts tagged with "queues"

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.

In product development, queues are one of the most critical yet invisible factors affecting your team's performance and economic outcomes. Unlike physical queues you can see, product development queues consist of information and work items waiting to be processed—making them financially and physically invisible.

Understanding queues is essential because they represent the root cause of most economic waste in product development, following Q2: The Principle of Queueing Waste.

Queues silently create massive economic waste in product development, following Q2: The Principle of Queueing Waste. Unlike visible manufacturing inventory, product development queues consist of invisible information and work items that accumulate without obvious warning signs.

Understanding these hidden costs is crucial because Q1: The Principle of Invisible Inventory makes queue problems extremely difficult to detect until they severely impact delivery. This article explores seven critical ways queues undermine economic performance and competitive advantage.

If you're new to queue concepts in product development, start with our foundational guide: Understanding Queues: The Invisible Bottleneck in Product Development.