My manager has offered me a team. I am not sure I want to manage people, but I am the bottleneck on my own work. Which way?

Option A is the better choice because the central problem is being the bottleneck on one's own work. Individual capacity is finite, so adding a team is the structural way to create leverage, distribute workload, and scale output beyond a personal ceiling. Relying only on getting faster at the hard part yields bounded marginal gains and leaves the core constraint intact. The offer is also unusually feasible because the prospective teammates are people the person would want to work with, which lowers the risk of taking on management despite the hesitation. Option B has a legitimate point in respecting a genuine preference to stay technical and avoiding staffing and review overhead, but it does not resolve the bottleneck: if the person remains the constraint, the idea that the team can grow without them is internally inconsistent or simply relocates the bottleneck. Treating management overhead as pure downside also ignores that it is part of the cost of removing the bottleneck. The reluctance to manage is a real risk, but given the problem as framed, Option A addresses the root cause more directly and effectively.