The period from 2019 to the present has seen Ching consolidate his "Bottleneck Guy" brand identity, expand his audience beyond software practitioners to general business and CFO audiences, and continue publishing while relocating from Scotland to Nelson, New Zealand.
New books and expanded audience
Significant publications mark this era:
The progression from software-specific project management (the writing-and-consulting-period) to accessible general business content reflects deliberate audience expansion. Ching's core thesis — find and fix the constraint — is not domain-specific, and this era tests how far it can be taken beyond software.
Media platforms
During this period Ching launched two Substack newsletters: "Dates, Dollars and Bottlenecks" and "Thrive with the Bottleneck Guy." The bottleneck-guy-podcast — launched around 2015 and later integrated into Substack — includes a 10-part reading of rolling-rocks-downhill and guest episodes with steve-tendon and others. These platforms extend his reach beyond book buyers. Podcast appearances on external shows, including the Focused podcast on Relay FM (2024), took his ideas to mainstream productivity audiences well outside the Agile/TOC community.
Upthinking
The upthinking concept — extending toc-for-software-development beyond the Five Focusing Steps into Goldratt's Thinking Processes territory — represents the most intellectually ambitious development of this era. Where the focccus-formula distilled and simplified TOC's constraint management cycle, upthinking explores the higher-level reasoning tools Goldratt developed: identifying assumptions, mapping conflicts, designing solutions. This moves Ching further upstream in the Goldratt toolkit and deeper into the conceptual heart of TOC.
The Phoenix Project parallel
The timing and scale of this brand-building era parallels gene-kim's trajectory after "The Phoenix Project" — expanding from a single breakthrough book to a platform, a series, and an institutional presence. Ching's scale remains smaller, but the pattern is recognizable: a central concept (bottleneck thinking), a distinctive brand identity (The Bottleneck Guy), multiple formats (books, newsletters, consulting), and steady audience development.
Relocation
Ching's move to Nelson, New Zealand represents a geographic shift without apparent intellectual discontinuity. The consulting practice at oddsocks-consulting and the writing work continue; the audience remains global through digital platforms. New Zealand had been part of his earlier career context (the Victoria University lectureship), so the relocation connects to earlier roots. To embed in the regional community, Ching organized the toc-down-under-2021 summit — an online conference bringing together fifteen Australasian TOC practitioners — and spoke at Scrum Australia 2021.