Surviving the traffic cop role - by Karl Yang

Every SaaS company at scale, and usually every product, eventually gets a slack channel where people shout a product question into the void because they don’t know who to ask directly. This happens when the company is big enough that people don’t actually know who all the other people are, or what their roles are. The first channel that pops up is usually Sales/CSM/Support/Marketing asking questions for PDE (Product/Design/Engineering). Customers ask questions, and sales people don’t know answers. Sometimes the question’s already been answered in something formally documented. Sometimes the question was answered last week in the same channel. Sometimes nobody knows the answer! It’s pretty expensive attention-wise for everyone who could possibly answer a question to read every single question, so usually a few cross functional people who haven’t burned out yet1 step up and play the role we’re going to call “traffic cop”. The traffic cop and channel provide value in a few ways: They main

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• Jonny Hsu