Workflow Bottleneck

A workflow bottleneck is when you lose 3 days waiting for a task that takes 10 minutes once someone actually does it. A designer waiting for analytics to run a query. A PM stuck until engineering builds a prototype. A researcher without dashboard access. The bottleneck was not the complexity of the work. It was the dependency structure itself, the waiting, the handoffs, the translation layers between roles that turned simple tasks into multi-week processes.