As engineering leaders, we’re constantly navigating competing priorities: ship faster, reduce risk, improve developer experience, stay aligned with product, scale sustainably.

In the face of all that, most teams respond by doing more. More process. More headcount. More tooling. More initiatives.

But often, what’s really needed is less scatter, more focus.

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a decades-old concept from manufacturing, but its relevance to modern software organisations is uncanny. If you care about throughput, flow efficiency, or predictable delivery at scale, TOC should be part of your strategic toolkit.

This post is a practical guide to TOC for CTOs, engineering leaders, and delivery specialists; what it is, when to use it, and how to apply it across your organisation.

What Is the Theory of Constraints?

Developed by Dr Eliyahu Goldratt and introduced in his seminal book The Goal, TOC is based on a simple idea:

Every system has a constraint. That constraint determines the performance of the system as a whole. To improve the system, focus on that constraint.

In practical terms: if you’re trying to improve delivery, and your teams are blocked at QA, swamped with reviews, or fighting fires in production, optimising everything else won’t help. You’ll get more work-in-progress, but not more output.

That constraint, sometimes called a bottleneck, is the limiting factor that governs your throughput. TOC gives you a systematic way to find and fix it.

The Five Focusing Steps

TOC uses five steps to manage constraints. Here’s how they translate into engineering and delivery strategy:

1. Identify the Constraint

This is your team’s current throughput limiter. It might be:

• A process bottleneck (e.g. waiting for code reviews or release approvals)

• A role bottleneck (e.g. all architecture decisions go through one lead)

• A capability constraint (e.g. not enough observability or test coverage to release confidently)

• A cultural constraint (e.g. teams fear failure and over-index on consensus)

Leadership’s role: Surface constraints systematically, not anecdotally. Invest in delivery metrics, value stream mapping, and observability across your SDLC.

2. Exploit the Constraint

Make sure the constraint is being used to its fullest potential. Are your senior reviewers context-switching all day? Are your release environments idle while test data is prepared manually?

Leadership’s role: Remove inefficiencies before scaling. You don’t need more capacity if you’re not using what you already have effectively.

3. Subordinate to the Constraint

Align the rest of the organisation around the constraint. If code reviews are the bottleneck, do your teams understand how to write reviewable PRs? Are reviewers being interrupted constantly?

Leadership’s role: Encourage local autonomy, but coordinate around global bottlenecks. This may mean slowing down non-critical streams to protect throughput elsewhere.

4. Elevate the Constraint

Once exploited and subordinated, now you look to increase capacity at the constraint. This might involve:

• Hiring

• Up-skilling

• Automation

• Reorganising teams

• Changing policies or approval paths

Leadership’s role: Invest precisely, not broadly. Avoid scattershot transformation. Fix the narrowest pipe, not the whole plumbing system.

5. Repeat

Every time you relieve one constraint, another emerges. That’s a good thing; it means the system is evolving.

Leadership’s role: Foster a continuous improvement culture. Empower teams to raise and resolve constraints without always waiting for top-down fixes.

Where TOC Helps Engineering Leaders

1. When You’re Scaling Fast

Adding headcount doesn’t always increase throughput. If one team owns a critical service, and every other team depends on them, you’ll hit a wall. TOC helps you find those scaling friction points before they paralyse delivery.

2. When Delivery Feels “Stuck” Despite High Activity

You see Jira boards full, Slack buzzing, meetings back-to-back, but value isn’t shipping. TOC helps you cut through the noise and pinpoint the real blocker, not just the loudest symptom.

3. When Strategy and Execution Feel Disconnected

If product roadmaps keep slipping or technical initiatives stall mid-flight, TOC can reframe the problem: is there a constraint in decision-making? Or in cross-team dependencies? TOC gives you a systems lens to align strategy with delivery.

Why TOC Matters for Technical Leaders

TOC shifts your mindset from optimising locally (making every team “efficient”) to optimising globally (improving system-wide outcomes).

That leads us to:

• Better cycle times

• More predictable delivery

• Fewer false starts and rework

• Healthier team dynamics (less burnout, more flow)

• A clearer link between technical investment and business value

And crucially, TOC reduces the temptation to fix symptoms with blanket solutions (like reorganisations, process overhauls, or over-engineered platforms) when often a single, well-targeted intervention could unblock the whole flow.

Recommended Reading for Leaders

If you want to dive deeper, these resources bridge the gap between theory and practice (please note, these are amazon affiliate links, if you buy via this link, I get a small percentage):

• The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

Still the best introduction to TOC, told through a fictional lens. Required reading for systems thinkers.

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim et al

Brings TOC into a modern IT and DevOps context. Great for helping leaders understand flow in tech orgs.

• The Bottleneck Rules by Clarke Ching

Quick read, full of practical applications of TOC to service and knowledge work.

• Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble & Kim

Uses data to show why flow, feedback, and constraint-focused improvement drive software delivery success.

• Beyond the Goal (audio) by Eliyahu Goldratt

Advanced thinking on how TOC applies to business transformation, policy constraints, and strategic leadership.

Final Thought

As technical leaders, our job isn’t just to build systems, it’s to build the conditions where systems can thrive and people can work at a sustainable pace.

The Theory of Constraints gives us a simple but powerful lens.

What’s the one thing slowing us down right now,and how do we fix that first?

If you can answer that, consistently and courageously, you’re already ahead of the game.

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