[mlthoughts2018]

How do you prevent this from becoming another stream of continuous disruptions that prevent knowledge workers from having enough sustained, concentrated time to develop big picture solutions?

Obviously you want to prioritize work to address what adds value for the customer. But can you really do that if everyone has to be constantly disrupting their work to scan incoming streams of idiosyncratic support requests? That doesn’t make sense to me.

I’m all for cultivating empathy for the customer and keeping people informed, but why does that need to be based on a constant inflowing stream of requests, as opposed to a monthly customer-focused all-hands meeting or something?

[linuxftw]

This is literally what the 'management' types should be doing, and then prioritizing this work along with feature work.

The support org should have enough staffing to be able to 'train up' and start tackling more and more issues themselves. Even if they're not writing the software, they can often work to get reproducables or get you most of the way there "null pointer deref of x caused this bug" etc.

[MBCook]

They have it timeboxed to 30m a week (month?). That should prevent constant interruptions.

It’s not like they’re making everyone true combo support/dev people. Just giving devs an occasional taste.