This is a common conflict! One perspective says that idle engineers cost money, so you should load up your engineers to 99 % utilisation with a huge backlog of

This is a common conflict! One perspective says that idle engineers cost money, so you should load up your engineers to 99 % utilisation with a huge backlog of tasks. The consequence of this is that tasks take, on average, months to complete because they sit idle most of the time, not being worked on. The other perspective is that idle tasks is what's expensive. Thus you must keep your engineers lightly loaded (say 70 %) so they can, in your words, pounce on new tasks. With this setup, most tasks spend a negligible time waiting and most time actively worked on. Now, how can idle tasks be more expensive than idle engineers? There are whole books dedicated to explaining this. I'd recommend starting with Reinertsen's Principles of Product Development Flow.