From save-your-startup
Identify and break the biggest bottleneck in your startup using a diagnostic loop based on Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. Walk through a five-step process to find what is limiting your throughput and systematically fix it.
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**From *Save Your Startup* by Rick Manelius (Chapter 10)**
From Save Your Startup by Rick Manelius (Chapter 10) Based on Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (from The Goal), adapted for startup teams by Rick Manelius
"All efficiencies around a bottleneck are illusions." -- Eliyahu Goldratt
Every system has a constraint -- one point that limits the throughput of everything else. In startups, this is often a person, a process, or a department. Optimizing anything other than the bottleneck is wasted effort. It feels productive. It is not.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about bottlenecks in startups:
"Star team members can be hero-villains. They can be heroes because nothing can be done without them. They can be villains because... well, nothing can be done without them."
If your best engineer is also your only engineer who can deploy, you do not have a star. You have a single point of failure wearing a cape.
Before we diagnose, let's check for symptoms:
Sound familiar? Let's find it and fix it.
We will work through this together, one step at a time. I will ask questions at each step to make sure we are being honest about what is really going on.
Where is the constraint?
The test is simple:
"If X stopped for one to ten hours, would this have the largest negative impact on our output?"
I will ask you:
We need to name it clearly before we can fix it. No hedging.
What upstream work is feeding the bottleneck that does not need to?
Not everything that flows into the bottleneck actually needs to. Some of it is habit. Some is poor routing. Some is work that should not exist at all.
I will ask you:
The cheapest capacity you can create is work you stop doing entirely.
What can be taken off the bottleneck's plate?
For every task that touches the bottleneck, ask three questions in order:
I will ask you:
80% quality done by someone else is often better than 100% quality stuck in a queue.
How do we increase the bottleneck's capacity?
Once you have stripped away everything that does not belong, the question becomes: how do we make the remaining work flow faster?
I will ask you:
Elevation is about investment. You are investing in the one point that limits everything else.
Is the bottleneck still here, or has it moved?
This is a loop, not a one-time fix. Once you address the current bottleneck, a new one will emerge. That is not failure -- that is how systems work.
I will ask you:
Go back to Step 1 and check again.
Let's find your bottleneck. Tell me:
I will walk you through each step of the diagnostic loop and push you to be specific.
By the end, you will have:
npx claudepluginhub rickmanelius/skills --plugin save-your-startupMaps a process or value chain, identifies the bottleneck stage using Theory of Constraints, and guides exploitation. Useful when you need to find what's constraining throughput.
Audits business workflows to identify waste and bottlenecks using value stream mapping. Use when process lead times are long or unclear.
Use when optimizing latency or throughput in a pipeline and one stage dominates—focus all effort on that single bottleneck, since speeding up the others changes nothing until it's fixed.