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Business vocabularyphrasal verb · /breɪk θruː/

break through

In simple English

To successfully overcome a significant obstacle or limitation that was blocking progress. Often used when a team solves a challenging technical problem.

Someone heard a colleague say "we finally broke through" and wants to know what it means in a work context.

At a glanceCEFR B1–B2
Commonness
Versatility
FormalityCasualFormalNeutral
Spoken ↔ WrittenSpokenWrittenBoth
Directness ↔ DiplomaticDirectDiplomaticNeutral
Region

Say it like this

✓We finally broke through on that authentication issue.
✓After three days, the team managed to break through the performance bottleneck.
✓Once we break through this blocker, we can ship the feature.
✓The new approach helped us break through the API limitations.

Real examples

Standup

"Yesterday we broke through the memory leak issue—tests are passing now."

Slack message

"Good news! We finally broke through on the integration problem. Deploying to staging soon."

GitHub PR

"This PR contains the fix that helped us break through the rate limiting constraints."

Jira ticket

"Status: Resolved. Team broke through the database connection timeout issue."

Retrospective

"A big win this sprint was breaking through the legacy code complexity."

Sprint planning

"If we can break through the dependency issues early, we'll finish all planned stories."

Pair programming

"Let's try a different approach—maybe we can break through this way."

Don't say this

✕We break through the bug yesterday.
✓We broke through the bug yesterday.— Use past tense 'broke through' when talking about completed actions.
✕We breaked through the problem.
✓We broke through the problem.— 'Break' is irregular: break → broke → broken. 'Breaked' is not correct.
✕We break through it.
✓We broke through it / We had a breakthrough.— For completed actions, use past tense. 'Breakthrough' (one word, noun) is the result.

Other forms

verb (base)

break through

"We need to break through this blocker today."

verb (past)

broke through

"The team broke through the issue yesterday."

verb (present participle)

breaking through

"We're breaking through the last obstacles now."

noun

breakthrough

"This fix was a major breakthrough for the project."

Often used with

break through a blockerVery common in agile teams—solving a problem that was stopping work.
break through limitationsGetting past restrictions in technology or process.
break through a bottleneckSolving a performance or workflow issue.
finally break throughEmphasizes effort and relief after solving a hard problem.
manage to break throughShows it required effort and wasn't easy.

Similar words

overcomeMore formal, works in written docs and presentations.
get pastMore casual, common in spoken English and Slack.
solveMore direct, focuses on the problem being fixed rather than the effort.
crackInformal—'We finally cracked it' means the same as 'broke through'.
push throughSimilar meaning but emphasizes effort and determination more.

Opposites

get stuckhit a wallbe blockedstallgive up

Practice

Try it

4 quick exercises

Choose the most natural sentence

1. How would you share good news in standup?

Find the error

2. Which sentence has a grammar mistake?

Complete the sentence

3. After three days of debugging, we finally _____ through the memory leak issue.

Rewrite naturally

4. We had success with the hard technical problem. (Use 'break through')

More words

blockerbottleneckunblockworkaroundget stuckroot causetechnical debtbreakthrough

Questions

Quick poll

Have you said "break through" in a standup this week?

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