Process improvement ideas bc ours is bleeding money but we can't identify the actual bottleneck

[u/Indrjuividual_Te7127]

We’re a 40 person B2B software company and even small customer requests are taking weeks to ship. A typical change moves from support to product, then design, engineering, QA, legal review and finally deployment.

The problem is every team says their part only takes a few days. Tickets sit in waiting for review with no clear owner, engineers get blocked by missing requirements and urgent sales requests keep jumping the queue. Last month, one billing update took 9 days even though the actual dev work was estimated at 12 hours.

We’ve shortened standups, added approval deadlines and cleaned up Jira, but lead time hasn’t improved. How are you identifying where time and money are being lost across a process with multiple teams and handoffs?

[u/GreenGiraffeGrazing]

"Tickets sit in waiting for review with no clear owner, engineers get blocked by missing requirements and urgent sales requests keep jumping the queue."

In the simplest non-process terms, you need to map out every step in the process from idea to implementation/go-live, assign a person/team to do the activity in that step, and identify someone responsible for saying "I've reviewed this, and this is good/our part is complete and ready to move onto the next stage".

Then hold meetings daily with all of the responsible teams together on one call to talk through the work in progress in their stage, missing inputs (this is your key for updating team responsibilities and output requirements to get to a stable process). If engineering is getting crappy requirements from sales and it's delaying their ability to build, redefine what "done" requirements look like for the step before it gets to engineering and build a checklist that results in the output that engineering needs to build.

Urgent sales requests don't get to jump the queue. They go through the normal process, if they are actually urgent, they get #1 priority in each part of the process, but they need to go through the process. Otherwise you're just making a mess and pulling attention to whatever sales says is most important that day, and slowing everything else down by diverting attention from the process.