The Software Industry's Dangerous Love Affair With Overproduction

You're more productive than ever, and somehow everything feels worse. The backlog never shrinks, the releases pile up behind flags, quality keeps slipping, and everyone is busy. That isn't a motivation or tooling problem. It's overproduction, the waste Toyota ranked worst of all, and the software industry has built an entire culture around celebrating it.

I recorded this talk to show what overproduction actually costs, how to spot it in your own organization, and how to measure your way toward something saner.

What the Talk Covers

• Why "producing more than the market demands" is not the same as "producing more than we want," and why that difference matters
• A mattress factory and a software org, side by side: every cost the factory pays to overproduce, we pay too
• Backlog bloat as inventory: what "keep the backlog full so the teams don't run out" really costs
• Feature flags as the loudest overproduction signal in the industry, and what they were supposed to be for
• The budget-mattress spiral: how pressure to produce erodes quality, trust, and eventually headcount
• The psychological trap: careers built on looking busy, and why the fix threatens all of us
• Takt time: a simple calculation that shows the gap between your pace and your market's actual demand
• Living in two worlds: how to build the breadcrumb trail of evidence that moves an organization without getting labeled a lunatic

Keep Going

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

• Who Moved My Bottleneck is the essay version of the argument, with the takt time math spelled out.
• Overproduction is waste, and you're probably doing it. is the letter I wrote when this thesis first took shape.
• The talk mentions a workshop on building metrics you can actually trust. Esther Derby and I run it together: Measures, Metrics, and Signals.
• If you want to talk through where overproduction is hiding in your organization, 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.