What does the delivery loop span?#
Product, engineering, operations and often finance and legal. That breadth is the point: the build loop sits inside it as one step, and every other step involves people and approvals that did not get faster when coding did.
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Why is this where the waiting is?#
Because each handoff between those functions is a queue, and queues dominate elapsed time. Work that takes hours of effort routinely takes weeks of calendar, and almost all of that gap is waiting rather than working.
Measuring it end to end is what DORA metrics do, and closing it with a declared outcome check is what turns a release into evidence rather than an event.