The hidden cost of “quick questions”
Every engineering leader wants engineers to ask for help. The cost is when “help” means interrupting the same two senior engineers all day. You pay for it in:
- slower delivery (context switching)
- slower onboarding (answers don’t compound)
- more on-call stress (people guess under pressure)
This usually isn’t a people problem. It’s a routing problem: ownership and answers aren’t easy to find.
What “quick questions” usually mean
Most repeat escalations come down to the same missing pieces:
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Ownership isn’t obvious If the question starts with “who owns this?”, escalation is the only path.
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The right link isn’t easy to find Runbook, dashboard, deploy history, or a known-good query lives in a thread somewhere.
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There’s no shared “first checks” New engineers don’t know what’s safe to try first, so they escalate early (or guess).
The fix: make answers reusable
When a question comes up, capture a small, repeatable answer:
- Owner: team + escalation channel
- Links: runbook + dashboards + deploy history
- First checks: 3–5 quick things to look at
- Safe next step: what’s low risk to try first
Keep it short. You’re not writing a doc set. You’re reducing repeat interruptions.
A simple 2‑week pilot you can run
Pick one team and one workflow (on-call triage is a great one).
Week 1
- Collect the top 20 repeat questions from Slack threads and standups.
- For each, write the owner + links + first checks.
- Put it where the questions happen (pinned message, a short doc, or a bot command).
Week 2
- Review what still escalated and why.
- Add 5 more answers and tighten the “first checks”.
- Make sure every entry has an owner.
How you know it’s working
You should see:
- fewer “who owns this?” pings
- fewer repeat questions from new engineers
- faster first response on incidents (because the links are right there)
It’s not about fewer questions. It’s that each question makes the team stronger next week.