Identifying the largest bottleneck for a person

Owned by Eliot Muir
Sept 23, 2021
2 min read

I find one of the most useful questions to ask someone whether they be a manager or an individual contributor is this one:

  • Where is your time going?

For me the answer that question would have been coding, which would have given a lot of insight into the most important problem I needed to solve. This was my personal bottleneck.

The best thing a coach for me could have done would be to ask me the questions like:

  • Why are you spending your time coding?

  • What problem does this solve?

With enough insight and asking the right questions the questioner would have discovered I was having trouble getting the quality of work I needed from my developers and with some really astute questions they could have figured out it was due to me needing some help on how to manage my relationships better with some core communication concepts.

Had they dug in they would have found instead my main tool for understanding developer productivity was the common narrative about 10x developers without a lot of understanding of what was required to help grow and support someone into becoming a 10x developer. (a 10x developer refers to the idea that some the best developers are 10 or 100 times more productive than an ‘average’ developer).

Anyway my main point is to help a person change and improve it’s important to figure out what the main time stressor is and begin by helping the person to solve that problem. If you don’t help them solve the main problem then it’s going to be difficult to help them - they are too busy and stressed to take in new ideas. It’s one of the reasons I really like the idea of building people up one concept at time rather than giving several books to read etc. It’s easier to take into account their learning style and up skill them one critical concept at a time. It all helps to build trust.