Bottleneck Walk

Follow the work until you find where waiting piles up and completions stop rising.

You started a woodworking hobby with big plans: cutting boards for every relative by December. You have bought better tools twice, yet finished pieces are not coming out any faster. Half-sanded boards are stacked everywhere. You keep upgrading whatever step you enjoy improving, which is not necessarily the step where the work is actually stuck.

Bottleneck Walk means physically or mentally following one piece of work through every step until you find where waiting piles up and completions stop rising. The cue is a process where effort keeps going in but finished output stays flat. The operation: trace one item end to end, note where items sit idle and where partly-done work accumulates, and identify the single step where the pile grows. In your garage, boards queue at finishing because you hate applying oil, so a faster saw changes nothing. Once found, add capacity at that step or route work around it, and expect the bottleneck to move somewhere else afterward, which means you walk again. What changes is that completions actually rise instead of inventory rising. Do not bother when output is genuinely limited by demand rather than process; if nobody wants more cutting boards, there is no bottleneck to find.