The Bottleneck CTO

Nothing moves without your approval. You're exhausted. And you can't figure out why adding people makes it worse.

My personal story

As an engineering manager for a long time I had the feeling that if I'm responsible for everything, and the CEO is going to hold me accountable, then I need to make all important decisions myself, I need to setup policies, I'm the one to introduce more processes and think about them in detail. After some years I've learned that while being good, my decisions were not exceptional, others could have made them too. And instead of me being the bottleneck for everything, I would have been the enabler. Realizing that I pushed every decision down to the teams, those who had to live with the consequences, and who new the details best.

The Bottleneck Trap

Work piles up. Everyone comes to you for decisions or advice. Things go wrong and you are involved in everything.

You compensate by working 12-hour days. The team is waiting on you for decisions. Architecture questions pile up. Integration questions pile up. The process needs to be updated. Developers want to migrate to another platform. Every meeting needs you in it.

You know something is wrong. You just can’t see that you are the problem.

This is the bottleneck trap. The very skills that made you successful as an individual contributor - attention to detail, deep technical knowledge, high standards - are now strangling your organization. You’ve become the single point of failure you’d never tolerate in a system architecture.

Signs You’re the Bottleneck

You might be the bottleneck if:

Nothing ships without your rgo. Code, designs, decisions - everything needs your stamp before it moves forward.
Your calendar is wall-to-wall meetings. You’re in every sync, every planning session, every incident response.
People wait for you. Engineers are blocked because they need your input. Questions sit in Slack for hours.
You can’t take vacation. The thought of being offline for a week fills you with dread. Who would make decisions?
Hiring doesn’t help. You added engineers but velocity stayed flat or dropped. More people just meant more coordination through you. On top of that, you are the bottleneck in hiring too.
You’re exhausted but feel indispensable. You can’t delegate because “no one else can do it right.”

Why It Happens

You were promoted for your technical excellence. You got here by being the best problem-solver. Letting others solve problems feels like giving up what made you valuable.

Your high standards become a trap. You have opinions on everything. You’ve seen what good looks like. Accepting “good enough” from others feels like lowering the bar. Building trust takes time you don’t have. Trust requires letting your team make mistakes. But you’re under pressure to deliver. Mistakes feel too expensive.

The work feels easier than managing. Reviewing code yourself takes 30 minutes. Teaching someone your standards and then reviewing their work takes hours - initially. And somewhere along the way, you started confusing being needed with being valuable. If you’re in every decision, you feel important. But being in every decision is the opposite of scaling.

Getting Out of the Critical Path

Accept that “good enough” often is.: Your way isn’t the only way. A decision made by someone else is often better than a perfect decision that waits for you.
Push back.: Whenever someone comes to you for a decision, ask “What would you do?” and then give them the go ahead.
Start with what only you can do.: Ruthlessly protect time for strategic work. Everything else should flow to your team.
Make yourself unnecessary for daily operations.: If the team can’t function for a week without you, you haven’t done your job.
Delegate outcomes, not tasks.: Don’t tell people what to do. Tell them what success looks like and let them figure out how to get there. Only delegate task to juniors, if possible delegate problems, projects, goals and outcomes - you’re less involved, and you’re no longer the bottleneck.

Create systems, not dependencies. :Document decisions. Create guidelines. Create an engineering culture. Build processes that don’t require you as a human router.

Give people room to fail.: Micromanaging prevents mistakes. It also prevents learning. Let your team build muscle.
Train people.: You can’t delegate because you don’t have people to delegate to. It takes effort and time investment to train your team to be able to take over your responsibilities. Start today.

You Can Let Go

The hardest part isn’t knowing what to delegate. It’s believing that your team can handle it.

They can. And they’ll never prove it until you give them the chance. Delegation is people development in it’s essence.

Letting go isn’t abandoning your standards. It’s trusting that you’ve built a team capable of meeting them - and giving them room to surprise you.

Ready for Support?

Breaking the bottleneck pattern is hard to do alone. Having someone who’s been through it - who can help you see your blind spots, help you delegate effectively and hold you accountable - makes the transition faster and way less painful.

Learn About CTO Coaching