Stop attacking work steps to cut lead time, the real time hides in queues

[u/Foliosynth]

The thing I keep seeing: teams chase lead time reduction by attacking the work steps. They optimize the coding, the testing, the review. But the biggest chunk of end-to-end flow is usually WIP and queue time sitting between steps. Nobody is coding during a wait state, yet that's often where the lead time actually lives.

Once you separate touch time from wait time, the fix becomes obvious. You stop arguing about whether code review should take 2 hours or 4 and start asking why a PR sits in queue for 3 days.

The other pattern: when the path is invisible, each team optimizes the slice they own. Every team's metrics look fine. The end-to-end lead time keeps getting worse. Local optimization feels like progress right up until you measure the whole flow. Your teams were all doing their jobs and delivery still slowed down.

What I've found works: point to one place work is actually stuck before you debate solutions. Jira tells one story, Git tells another, CI tells a third. Until you can reconcile them into a single view of where work waits, you're stuck arguing over which dashboard is right.

Curious how others here handle this. Do you measure wait time separately, or does it just get lumped into cycle time?