Guardian — answering questions from other teams efficiently

Do you have a Slack channel or emails where colleagues outside your team ask questions? Sometimes everybody is busy with their work and whoever asks the question will struggle to get an answer. We had this problem, but not anymore.

Every week, we have a person in the team (developer, QA, product manager, tech lead, it doesn’t matter) who is the guardian. Besides their main responsibilities, the guardian is also responsible for answering questions from other teams. The guardian doesn’t necessarily know the answer, but is responsible for finding the right person.

Who is the next guardian?

We have a list of all team members on a wiki page which we consult on Mondays to find the next guardian. If that person is on holiday/unavailable, then the next person from the list will take the role.

How do people from other teams identify the guardian?

We mention the guardian in our public Slack channel’s topic. However, people don’t need to know this. They can still ask a question by referring @here or by sending an email to our mailing list and then the guardian will answer.

What improvements have we seen since we have the guardian?

• The team is less distracted, since there is a single person responsible for looking at questions from other teams.
• We are quicker at answering questions from other teams.
• There is more cross-team collaboration.

I want to try it. What do I need to do?

• Create a page with the list of people in your team and an empty column for adding dates.
• Agree with the team that one person is responsible for addressing questions on your team’s communication channels (e.g. email, Slack channels) for a week.
• Every Monday morning, the guardian from the previous week will ensure the next guardian is selected and identified in the Slack channel’s topic. The previous guardian also needs to remember to update the page with the dates when they were the guardian.

This process worked well for us, but you might need to adjust it to your needs.

Give it a try, if you face the problem of answering questions from other teams efficiently. You will all work more closely, help each other and be less distracted.

Photo by Ilkka Kärkkäinen on Unsplash