[asim]

I wouldn't split the team just because personally I think it'll weaken the concept of the "platform team". Ideally what you want is people with different priorities/focuses within the team. Some on low level ops, others on high level APIs or services. Identifying who's skills fit what and letting them do that is key.

The other thing is just to split the category of work into 3 things; p1 bug fixes / long term projects / support work. Each week just make a note of time allocation for each based on what's happening (sometimes a p1 fix can take up the whole week). Try to minimise the support burden by creating office hours and defining SLAs for the rest of the company.

Make sure your team is not getting buried in support work. What's going to help them is just being able to filter out what's an immediate priority versus pushing off to tomorrow or the day after. Don't let them get bogged down or pinged constantly. Try to make that request flow async.

And most importantly, give them the time to accomplish tasks they think are most important. They are deep in the trenches and know what's going to be p1 vs not. Trust in their ability to guide the outcomes.

[davideberdin]

Thanks for the tips. I do appreciate them :)

`Don't let them get bogged down or pinged constantly. Try to make that request flow async.` - This is very true yet so hard. Slack is not helping at all with this issue. I will check with the team about office hours or maybe a triaging system to minimize the Support effort.

[asim]

If you have a #platform team channel don't let that become the place the rest of the company comes and makes unfiltered requests. That's the channel for your team. It's really important to have that boundary, otherwise they don't have a safe space to communicate and have to resort to private channels. People should be able to see what the platform team discusses but not necessarily just start asking random support questions.

Also, try create a knowledge base for the rest of the company. If there's frequent issues that are already resolved which others could just search a page for or some runbook for things they can do themselves it's best to give them that "self serve" method.

[davideberdin]

Makes sense -- Knowledge Base is something I should definitely tackle. Thanks :)