Most time spent answering questions is lost, especially if those questions are repeated
Disproof
Dashboards and docs that people actually use first
Consequences
When engineers are DM'd for delivery status, engineers start losing 20% of their day from interruption and context switching
Surprise surprise, delivery takes 20% longer and anyone whose work is scheduled on the original delivery time, proceeds to get rekt
When PMs are treated as living product/marketing documentation, other teams learn helplessness, creating a reinforcement loop
Suddenly PMs don’t add value anymore because time that could be spent on real product work is burnt
Status questions thankfully go away, but 'how to use' and 'how to sell' questions represent an evergreen time sink
Eventually, organisational fitness is lost to the point where it is outcompeted, and dies
Causes
When nobody has explicitly thought about what information is needed by who
When it’s been normalised to ask people questions that a transparent and easily locatable document/tracker/dashboard could answer
When a product team has developed an allergy to ‘feeling watched’, and doesn't propagate status outwards
Usually due to bad relationships with the rest of the company, or historical micromanagement, and as a result, under-reports status
Ironically, the only way the rest of the company has for understanding what’s going on is to interrupt by polling for status, making product people feel more watched
Things further slow down if there’s no standardised way of reporting status and you’re making things up every time someone asks a similar thing
In the case of 'how to use/sell' questions, can be when product teams are too busy or not taking responsibility for the end result of actually getting documentation used by making them relevant/readible/findable
Approaches
If a company’s culture has evolved in such a way that it’s OK to do this, it’s going to take a lot of butt-hurt and boundary-setting to claw people back to it
Design something truly appropriate for the work you do and for who needs to know
Any solution that has not properly anticipated the information needs of its consumers (i.e. everyone else in the company) will fail because it won’t tell them what they need to know
Any solution that doesn’t build a habit in its consumers will fail because they won’t remember to use it
Any solution that has not properly anticipated the need for the product team to not do pointless paperwork will fail because they won’t fill it out