Engineers losing 10-20% of their time to repetitive questions. Most teams don’t even measure it.
Each question felt small. “Which table has order history?” “What does this field mean?” “Who owns this dataset?”
But they stack. One team tracked it: 200 hours per month lost across 10 engineers. That’s 2 full-time equivalents doing nothing but answering Slack messages.
The root cause wasn’t laziness, but tribal knowledge trapped in people’s heads. Every analyst who needed customer data had to ask someone. Every schema change required explaining which tables were affected.
They implemented a metadata catalog - automated collection, searchable interface, ownership assignments. The tooling mattered less than the discipline of keeping it current.
Six weeks later, Slack messages dropped 80%. The team redirected those 200 hours toward building new capabilities instead of answering “where is this data” for the 100th time.
These questions tell you where self-service fails. If you’re not counting them, you’re flying blind.
How much time does your team lose to repetitive questions each week?