What does it mean that bottleneck visibility?

Make your current bottleneck visible so you can focus on it.

Example: A product team lead suspects their bottleneck is code review — pull requests sit for days before anyone looks at them. She takes a red marker and writes 'Current constraint: code review. Avg wait: 3.4 days. Target: <1 day.' on the whiteboard next to the standup area. She updates the number every morning. Within four days, something shifts without any process mandate: developers start reviewing each other's PRs before starting new work. By the end of the second week, the average wait has dropped to 1.1 days. She never sent an email, never changed a policy, never assigned review rotations. She made the constraint visible, and the system self-organized around it. The whiteboard did what six months of sprint retrospective action items had failed to do.

Try this: Identify your current binding constraint — the bottleneck you have been measuring since L-0945. Write it on a physical sticky note or index card in this format: '[Bottleneck name]: [current metric value] / [target value].' Place it where you will see it at least ten times per day — on your monitor, next to your keyboard, on your bathroom mirror, on the dashboard of your car. Every evening for one week, update the metric. At the end of the week, answer two questions in writing: Did the number improve? And did you notice yourself making different decisions during the day because the constraint was in your visual field? Do not skip the physical artifact. A digital dashboard you can minimize is not visible. A sticky note you cannot avoid is.