The slowest point in the factory

Imagine a factory floor. A belt runs through the building. Parts move from one station to the next. One machine cuts. Another bends. Another drills. At the end, someone checks the finished pieces before they are packed into boxes. Some stations are loud and fast. One machine can produce a part every few seconds. Another is slower. Maybe it needs more care. Maybe a person has to inspect each piece by hand before it can move on. At first, the fast machine looks like progress. More movement. More output. More noise. But then the parts begin to pile up. The fast machine keeps going, but the next station cannot keep up. The belt fills. The floor gets crowded. The factory did not become faster. It created a queue. A factory is not as fast as its fastest machine. It is as fast as its slowest point. I think about this a lot with software teams. We like to talk about speed. How fast can we build? How fast can we ship? How fast can engineers turn ideas into code? But software work also moves…