Help, we're drowning in interrupts!
A common theme of engineering teams: they don't get anything done because there's always someone with the latest something, just one more question, just one more quick fix...
Here are a few tips to deal with the flood. The first step is: do not accept this as normal, even if your team has resigned to interrupt hell years ago.
Fix sources of noise
Alerts going crazy? Support or customers feeling lost? Try to work the system instead of whack-a-mole-ing. Fixing up those alert rules or rewriting documentation (or, gasp fixing the product) can very easily pay dividends.
Move sync interrupts to async
"Please file a ticket with this template" does two three things:
- Tickets can be prioritized and scheduled using your regular work-scheduling workflow (Agile or whatever -- you do have a process, right?).
- Templated questions ensure high signal-to-noise ratio: your engineers won't spend a week of back-and-forth asking the same questions all the time.
- It leaves an artifact to be referenced later (for accounting of time spent, for resolving the same question again, for escalating etc).
Increase the cost of pings
A neat trick: don't respond immediately on chat, even if you know the answer. If you do, you're training people that it's cheaper to ask you than to do even minimal research first.
It's not easy, as all of us love to be useful, and it might "only cost you five seconds", but that's a context switch and a non-zero chance of a rabbit hole.
Let them do their research. Then let them file a ticket.
Visions, roadmaps, explicit planning
You're not writing a roadmap for the CTO to read once a year. You're making one as a tool to make sure everyone agrees on what you(r team) should be doing, and that other teams can also plan related work.
Use it! Wave it about every time someone wants to toss new work at your team: "Look, this is our agreed plan of work. What should we not do in favor of your project?"