You ever been stuck in traffic, watching a single brake light flicker on a mile ahead, and you just know you’re in for 45 minutes of existential dread? You inch forward, stop. Inch forward, stop. Meanwhile, some guy in a sports car is weaving through lanes like he’s in Fast & Furious: Midlife Crisis. And yet—somehow—you both get to the next exit at the exact same time.
Congratulations, you’ve just experienced The Goal in action.
“The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt is a business book disguised as a novel, where a factory manager tries to save his plant from collapse. It’s got all the drama: supply chain disasters, corporate pressure, even marital problems—because nothing spices up bottleneck theory like a failing marriage. But beneath the corny dialogue and manufactured tension is a simple, powerful truth:
Your business—or your startup, or your software team—is just a really, really frustrating highway. And if you don’t figure out how to fix the traffic flow, you’re doomed to spend eternity in the slow lane while your competitors speed past.
So let’s talk about why your product pipeline is a traffic jam, why the slowest team members should be in front, and why putting your engineers in the “fast lane” is probably just making everything worse.
Introducing The Goal
The Goal is about maximizing profits for a factory. The factory takes raw materials and processes them through an internal pipeline to generate revenue. Along the way, it teaches lessons about bottlenecks, inventory, and efficiency. While fascinating, these ideas don’t immediately translate to software engineering or tech teams.
Tech companies aren’t always focused on maximizing profits—many intentionally lose money to fuel growth. Software development doesn’t involve physical equipment; it’s mostly humans converting caffeine into code. However, The Goal still holds valuable lessons—if we translate them correctly.
For an established company, profit remains the primary goal. For a startup or software team, a more relevant metric might be active users. Let’s assume our objective is turning capital investments into active users—then we can apply The Goal’s insights to optimize our workflow.
The Accordion Effect and Dependencies
One of the first lessons in The Goal is about dependencies in your pipeline. The book uses a story about Boy Scouts walking in a single-file line to explain the Accordion Effect, but traffic is a more relatable example:
When one car slows down, every car behind it must slow down. Each car’s slowdown compounds, creating a shockwave traffic jam. Cars take time to accelerate again, making it hard to return to an even flow.
Solving the Accordion Effect
The Goal suggests putting the slowest vehicles at the front. In traffic, that seems counterintuitive—slow cars in front would slow everyone down. However, in a software development pipeline, we aren’t done until the slowest “vehicle” reaches the destination.
If we let the fastest cars (or teams) go first, they’ll encounter mistakes and slowdowns that cascade to the slower teams. Instead, putting the slowest teams in front minimizes disruptions. The faster teams can better handle the accordion effect, ensuring the entire pipeline moves efficiently.
Applying This to Software Development
Key Facts About Software Development:
- Once a feature is in production, removing it is difficult.
- Features create overhead—every feature slows the pipeline over time.
- Not all features lead to growth, but growth usually requires new features.
If we imagine that the “cars” are people working on features, then a feature isn’t complete until everyone has done their work. A typical feature pipeline might look like this:
- Product – Research and develop feature ideas.
- Design – Translate research into tangible designs.
- Backend Developers – Implement APIs and database structures.
- Frontend Developers – Build the UI and integrate it with the backend.
- QA – Test and verify functionality before release.
How can we apply The Goal’s lessons here?
Optimizing the Pipeline
We should structure our teams like traffic:
- Product (semi-trucks) – The slowest part of the process. If the product team moves too fast, the pipeline gets overwhelmed.
- Design (buses) – Slightly faster than product but still deliberate.
- Backend Developers (pickup trucks) – Need to be faster than design to compensate for any slowdowns.
- Frontend Developers (sports cars) – Should be eager and ready for backend work as soon as it’s available.
- QA (greased lightning) – Needs to be blazing fast; a slow QA process means valuable features sit idle.
By structuring the team this way, the entire pipeline moves faster. If QA is too slow, the whole system backs up, creating inefficiency.
A Good Pipeline in Action
Let’s assume our pipeline follows this ideal structure:
- Day 0: Product team spends 10 days on research.
- Day 10: Design team takes 5 days to complete designs.
- Day 15: Backend team completes implementation in 3 days.
- Day 18: Frontend team finishes in 2 days.
- Day 20: QA completes in 1 day.
💡 Feature is released in 20 business days.
A Bad Pipeline in Action
Now, imagine a reversed pipeline where QA is the slowest:
- Day 0: Product team churns out ideas in 2 days.
- Day 2: Design, overwhelmed, takes 6 days.
- Day 8: Backend, delayed by previous features, takes 10 days.
- Day 18: Frontend, overwhelmed, takes 12 days.
- Day 30: QA, backed up, takes 14 days.
💡 Feature is released in 44 business days—double the time.
A pipeline structured like this leads to technical debt, burnout, and inefficiency. This is what people call a Feature Factory—endless new features with no time for quality improvements.
You Probably Can’t Create the Perfect Pipeline
Pipelines are messy. People quit, get sick, and management might disagree with your approach. You likely can’t rearrange your pipeline completely, but you can mitigate damage by:
- Identifying bottlenecks – Use a ticket board to track workflow.
- Reducing slowdowns for key teams – Ensure slow teams (semi-trucks) aren’t interrupted or delayed.
- Automating where possible – Free up time for the slowest stages.
- Reallocating tasks – If backend is a bottleneck, move non-essential work elsewhere.
Declaring Bankruptcy
If your pipeline is completely broken and unfixable, sometimes starting over is the best option. Yes, rewriting codebases is often discouraged, but there are times when it makes sense. A fresh start can allow you to build for speed from the beginning.
If you decide to rewrite, prioritize fast development cycles and automation. The goal is not just to have better code—it’s to ensure your team can work faster and more efficiently.