I've seen the same story play out at client after client. The team adopts AI coding tools, developers get dramatically faster, everyone's excited, and three months later the release calendar looks exactly like it did before.

A team ships only as fast as its slowest step, and even before AI, writing the code wasn't always the slowest step. Manufacturers figured this out in the 1980s and named it the Theory of Constraints: speed up any step except the constraint and you get nothing but a bigger pile of work stacked in front of it. Sound familiar? In one survey of 3,500 developers, 68% said AI saves them 10 or more hours a week, and half said they lose just as many hours to reviews, approvals, and other organizational friction.

In this talk we'll use Theory of Constraints to find your team's real bottleneck, tour the five places it usually hides (code review, QA, requirements, deployments, and environments), and apply AI in ways that can help fix it. Then you can go find the next bottleneck, because there's always a next one.