A team with 20 open PRs is mathematically slower than a team with 3.

Not “feels slower.” Not “probably slower.”

Is slower.

If your tickets take two weeks to cross the board while coding takes a few hours, the problem isn’t effort — it’s how much work your team keeps in flight at the same time.

And there’s a 65-year-old law that explains exactly why.

The equation

Little’s Law, proven by MIT professor John Little in 1961, applies to any stable flow system over a long enough interval.

Lead Time = WIP / Throughput

In plain English:

Lead Time — how long it takes for a ticket to go from started → merged → deployed

WIP — Work In Progress, the number of items currently in flight

Throughput — how many items your team completes per unit time (usually per week)

This is not a metaphor.…