Main idea

"Writing was never the bottleneck of the job" is accurate as long as you're talking about arbitration: deciding was never a writing problem, and writing faster never made a choice sounder.

That says nothing about the second limit. A Product Manager alone for an entire company, having to produce a video in fifteen languages with subtitles, articles in four or five languages, the associated posts and the sales briefs, isn't blocked on a decision: they are up against a wall of volume. That work wasn't arbitrated and then pushed back, it simply wasn't feasible.

Two different limits, then, and you have to name which one you are lifting. Lifting the volume ceiling speeds up no decision; it makes feasible what wasn't, and brings out work nobody had put in a plan because it was out of reach.

Why it matters

This avoids a frequent confusion when assessing what tooling gains you: you demonstrate that the decision didn't speed up and conclude that nothing happened.

And it explains why some work appears without ever having been prioritized: it wasn't pushed back, it was impossible.

Nuances and limits

The wall of volume is sometimes an organizational signal rather than a fact of life: fifteen languages to be produced by one person raises a question about headcount and scope first.

And lifting the ceiling moves the problem towards decision: when everything becomes feasible, choosing what deserves doing becomes the only hard point again — a point that volume was masking.

Open questions

• How do you recognize, in a list of work never done, what was set aside by arbitration and what was out of reach?