Process Before People Fix

Before you replace the data engineer who seems slow, count how many people can hand them work.

A CTO asked me to look at exactly this. The company’s only data engineer was “slow”, deadlines kept slipping, and the plan was to hire someone more senior above them.

I spent the first days reading their Slack more than their code. Requests came in from sales, finance, product and the founders, mostly through DMs, each marked urgent. Nobody decided what came first, so the engineer tried to do all of it and finished little.

Nobody could see how much work was in flight, or who it was for.

The fix was plain process. Requests went through one channel, and DMs got a polite link to it. The CTO set the order in a 20-minute call every week. The engineer stopped picking up new work once three things were active.

Within a month the complaints dropped. The senior hire got rescoped into part-time architecture direction, which was what the team had been missing.

I’ve got this wrong the other way too, blaming process when the skills weren’t there. So I check both now. The intake just tends to get looked at last.

If your data person looks slow and nobody can say what they’re working on, that’s worth 30 minutes: https://app.cal.eu/thomasnys/30min?utm_source=linkedin&utm_content=2026-09-21-process-before-people-fix