No Wrong Doors.
Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function.
For the most part, technology organizations are not complex bureaucracies, but sometimes they do seem to operate that way. A particularly common pattern is along the lines of:
- Product Engineer joins #observability
- Product Engineer: Hey, I’m having trouble with alerts, can you help me with that?
- Obs Engineer: Oh yeah, for sure, what alerts?
- Product Engineer: Ok, so there at this Datadog link…
- Obs Engineer: Got it. Yeah, so that’s in the SRE Obs team now. We do observability for the product analytics data lake, not production observability.
- Obs Engineer: Ok. Yeah, good. Let me find SRE Obs
- Product Engineer joins #sre-obs
- Product Engineer: Hi, I got steered here by #observability, I think this is where I can get help with issues like Datadog link…
- SRE Engineer: Oh, absolutely. That looks misconfigured. Where is your app’s completed Observability Checklist and when did you review it with us?
- Product Engineer: …how would I know that?
In that example, the product engineer is first forced to navigate the unintuitive organizational design to find the right team for questions about Datadog. After they find the right team, they are forced to figure out how the SRE Observability team records when a checklist is completed. In almost all cases, the product engineer ends up frustrated, but it’s not just them. Almost every time, the observability engineer and SRE engineer also probably feel frustrated that the product engineer didn’t know enough to navigate their bureaucracy successfully.
Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how engineering organizations can adopt a variant of the No Wrong Doors policy to directly connect folks with problems with the right team and information. Then the first contact point becomes a support system for navigating the bureaucracy successfully.
For example, imagine if this had happened instead:
- Product Engineer joins #observability
- Product Engineer: Hey, I’m having trouble with alerts, can you help me with that?
- Obs Engineer: Oh yeah, for sure, what alerts?
- Product Engineer: Ok, so there at this Datadog link…
- Obs Engineer: Got it. Yeah, let me start a thread in #sre-obs to help get this sorted
- Product Engineer joins #sre-obs
- Obs Engineer: Hey all, Product Engineer is having trouble with Datadog (see link here). Product Engineer: if you look into this spreadsheet you can find the Observability Checklist entry for your app to add to this thread to help with debugging
- SRE Engineer: OK, so..
Now the product engineer gets support from the same two folks as before, but because they’re helping the product engineer navigate the process, they get to a better situation.
Beyond being helpful to your colleagues, which is an obvious goal in some companies and not-at-all a cultural priority in others, I think there are a number of other advantages to think about here. First, being helpful creates positive relationships across organizations. Second, it makes it more obvious where you do have genuine areas of ambiguous ownership, and makes it possible for informed parties to escalate that rather than relying on folks with the least context to know to escalate the ambiguities. Third, it educates folks asking for help about the right thing to do, because a knowledgeable person helping is a great role model of the best way to solve a problem. Finally, if you happen to route to the wrong person–it happens!–then you learn that immediately rather than forcing someone without context to navigate the confusion.
The most effective mechanism I’ve found for rolling out No Wrong Door is initiating three-way conversations when asked questions. If someone direct messages me a question, then I will start a thread with the question asker, myself, and the person I believe is the correct recipient for the question. This is particularly effective because it’s a viral approach: rolling out No Wrong Door just requires any one of the three participants to adopt the approach. Even the question asker can do it, although the power dynamics of the interaction do make it a bit harder for them.