Every data team has a Brent. The person every ticket eventually routes through.
If you’ve read The Phoenix Project, you remember Brent. The genius engineer who knows how everything works. Every escalation, every weird outage, every “quick question” lands on his desk. He’s productive. He’s also the bottleneck blocking the entire org.
Data teams have a Brent. Usually a senior engineer who built the original pipeline, knows the warehouse intimately, and is the only person who actually understands the lineage between three legacy sources.
Symptoms:
- Tickets get reassigned to them after sitting unowned for two days.
- Every onboarding doc starts with “ask [their name].”
- Their PRs get merged in 20 minutes; everyone else waits two days.
- They haven’t taken more than a week of vacation in 18 months.
The problem is the system that produced Brent. The team optimized for short-term velocity by routing everything through the most capable person. That worked at 5 engineers. It collapses at 15.
The fix is uncomfortable because it slows things down before it speeds them up:
- Brent stops doing the work and starts pairing on it. Slower this quarter. Faster every quarter after.
- Documentation becomes a deliverable. Block time for it like any other ticket. Knowledge in one head is a liability.
- Tickets get assigned by capability. The team grows into ownership instead of routing around it.
The hardest part is selling this internally. Leadership sees Brent shipping fast and reads it as productivity. The cost - a team that can’t function without one person - shows up months later as missed deadlines, burnout, and the resignation email nobody saw coming.
Who’s the Brent on your data team right now?