Dependencies Are Silently Killing Your Productivity

Your teams are full of capable people who are always busy, and somehow everything still takes forever. Before you blame the people or buy another tool, look at the dependencies. Every handoff, every queue, every "waiting on another team" is quietly deciding your delivery speed, and almost nobody owns how those handoffs actually work. AI is making this worse, not better, by pushing more volume into the same unmanaged chains.

I recorded this talk to show where the waiting and the failures really come from, and what you can do about it.

What the Talk Covers

• A thought experiment: if you could snap your fingers and finish the coding instantly, how much faster would delivery actually get?
• The math of chained work: every dependency cuts the desirable outcomes in half, and the chains are longer than you think
• The in-between: each step of the chain is well understood, but the costs live between the steps, where nobody owns anything
• Why QA, code review, and other quality gates behave exactly like dependencies
• How practices like TDD move the pain up front where it is cheap instead of at the end where it is not
• The specialization myth: splitting work by function feels efficient and multiplies the waiting

Keep Going

If you watched that and recognized your organization, here is where to go next:

• Death To Code Reviews covers the most sacred dependency of them all and what I tell teams to do instead.
• AI Productivity Dies with Dependencies is the letter I wrote alongside this talk, with the compounding math spelled out.
• If you want to talk through the dependencies working against you, grab time with me.

If this kind of straight talk is useful, I write a short letter every Friday. Stories, tips, techniques, and the occasional bits of beekeeping. Join it below.