Constraint Sandwich

When optimization is damaging something important, write 'improve X, while preserving Y, under Z' and map what's actually feasible.

Your push to ship the product faster is working; cycle time is down 30 percent. It's also quietly wrecking things: bug reports are climbing, and your best engineer just mentioned burnout in a one-on-one. Optimization was never the problem. Optimizing one number while the things it's damaging go unstated, that's the problem, and it's the exact cue for this heuristic.

Constraint Sandwich is a 30-second reframing with a fill-in-the-blank structure: write "improve X, while preserving Y, under Z," then map what's actually feasible. For your team: improve shipping speed, while preserving defect rates and sustainable workload, under current headcount and this quarter's commitments. The sentence takes 30 seconds; its effect is structural. "Ship faster" had one variable and infinite apparent room; the sandwich version has a bounded feasible region, and exploring that region surfaces the honest options: maybe 15 percent faster is achievable within the constraints, or maybe 30 percent is achievable only by cutting scope rather than corners. Decisions become tradeoffs you can discuss instead of damage you discover later. It works when the previously silent casualties, quality, people, get names and thresholds. The spec's warning: do not protect every preference as non-negotiable. A sandwich with 12 inviolable Ys is just paralysis with better formatting.