Binding constraint
A binding constraint is the single stage of a business that caps overall throughput. Because work flows through stages in series, improving any stage other than the binding constraint produces no additional output.
The term comes from the Theory of Constraints. In an agency the candidates are acquisition, conversion, delivery capacity, and margin. Exactly one of them is binding at any given time.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable: most improvement work is wasted. An agency that fixes its delivery process while conversion is the constraint has spent money to make a queue longer.
How Hydra uses it
Hydra records a binding constraint per client and re-tests it each quarter, because fixing one constraint always promotes another.
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