BottleNeck

Place/action to Focus your attention/effort, instead of drizzling BullShit. Bottleneck literally refers to the top narrow part of a bottle. In engineering, it refers to a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or small number of components or resources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottleneck

See Theory Of Constraints

• http://www.isixsigma.com/methodology/theory-of-constraints/applying-theory-constraints-manage-bottlenecks/
• http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/toc.htm

See Clarke Ching

• Rolling Rocks Downhill
• Bottleneck Rules

cf Leverage

Can apply at the strategic/Business Model level, too, to drive Product Management

Jan'2021: has anyone already covered this?

Goal: figure out which potential development projects have highest Business Value. If you explained your Business Model to someone (say, an Alien Intelligence) for 5min, and asked "how do we grow?" they'd suggest pulling some simple lever: "buy more ads".

• Why wouldn't that work? That might be a clue....

Or imagine you have a Magic Wand that made your desired Action happen instantly? How likely would it be to result in the growth you want?

A Five Whys process can help find the Root Cause of your frustration.

Actually, since a Business is a Complex System inside a Complex System, there's probably not 1 Root Cause... or y'all can't agree... Sometimes you attack 1, and then you run into #2...

• a diagram of effects can help collect different aspects of challenges, and relate them... this can result in refining the definition of each, and seeing which ones are "in the middle" of lots of clusters of other issues, and which are key to feedback loops which make things worse/harder over time.....

Sometimes you run into a Game Rule: "we can't buy more ads because it's not in the budget". But doesn't buying ads increase Profit? Are you sure? Can you model it, and prove the model is accurate? How soon will you see results? Are you sure past growth wouldn't have happened anyway? Maybe that Game Rule is there to keep you from kidding yourself...

cf Metrics, esp AARRR, (2016-09-22) Corey Haines Methodology Per Business

Can drive path toward Meaningful Life

Effective Entrepreneur model thinks of quarterly iterations/experiments toward 25-year visions. Those are best targeted at a Bottleneck.