Surviving the traffic cop role
Issue no. 0017
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 maintain a bank of canned answers, both formal (FAQ doc) and informal (knowing the best way to answer a particular customer question), which saves everyone else from spending tokens on thinking up answers
They route questions to correct(er) people and reduce misdirected messages - turns out that question was actually for the Platform team, not the Apps team. This reduces both unnecessary distractions and also latency for getting answers
The traffic cop saves everyone from having to check the slack channel
The primary activity is taking and processing semi-structured inputs (“Is this a bug?” “What happens if the customer puts in a negative value?” “Do we support backdating?). They then have to figure out what the path to resolution is. Usually it’s one of five things:
This has a formally documented answer - read the support doc here!
This has a formally documented answer that’s stale - oops! maybe we’d update it more often if people read the docs…
This was informally documented in Slack two hundred threads (i.e., one month) ago
This is not documented, but I, the traffic cop, can answer it.
This is not documented. But I, the traffic cop, know who should have the answer, and will @-tag them.
Some of these are harder than they sound at first. How do you know a document is stale? How do you know if something was asked before in Slack?
Traffic Cop is never someone’s formal job responsibility, but projects grind to a halt without them. Usually the traffic cop has the job title of Product Manager, BizOps, Product Ops, Product Marketing Manager, or Early Employee because they are cross functional enough to know both the ask-ers and the ask-ees, and are also often actually writing the documentation.
I have never been thrilled with my performance in this role, but there are some trusted techniques for doing it more scalably:
Track inputs like tickets. Lightest weight but least reliable is using a slack react for each message, heavier but more robust is importing into Linear/Jira as a ticketing system and pushing responses back into Slack.
Don’t be a ball hog. ****It makes you feel important but trains your teammates to let you do their jobs for them. When you inevitably drop the ball, you will only get credit for dropping the ball.
Batch responses. Resist the urge to jump on every red bubble. You’re probably already fried from context switching, no need to do it more.
Share DMed questions in the channel, and process the responses - they should be integrated into enablement meetings, support docs, etc. Better yet - gently ask people who DM questions to ask them in the channel.
Self serve question answering (e.g., docs, FAQs, etc.) has a minimum activation energy. You need to get them to be “good enough” that people will look there first. In my experience it’s roughly covering ~50% of their questions. You also then need to maintain these docs for staleness.
Best of luck.
Author’s note: if the below role sounds like something you do, I’d love to talk to you. We can do some group therapy and swap notes. You can reply to this email or send an email to karl@lightpage.com
There’s a game of chicken, where the loser is the one who is most susceptible to red bubbles
Karl - Great note and resonated with my experience last year to a T. We created a similar role last year at my company for AI related questions coming from CSMs and Sales people last year.