Warm Handoffs
luckymike.dev
luckymike.dev
I like it. It doesn't have to take any effort. When you hit reply on an email sent to the wrong person, add the correct email to the field with recipients. That's it!
In something like Slack, you write the answer in the correct location for the question. That's it.
These are tiny changes that don't cost anything but can decrease friction a lot, because the nobody has to repeat themselves any time someone has gone through the wrong door.
is another, all somewhat circling around the same issues
Someone who's new, or seems overwhelmed, or has shown some effort... might get more hand-holding help... than someone who seems to be, say, ignoring the single-source-of-truth-for-most-all-things wiki that was impressed upon them, and just trying to knock off a task as easily as possible, with no consideration for others' time.
A suspected former is more likely to get my best customer service, team player help. "Have you met Jane? I think she's started a new product feature for that, but there's also a related tailoring that Sales has been doing. Let me introduce you to Jane, and we can see which thing you should be you should be working with today. I'm curious myself." (Goals are to unblock this person, have everyone on the right tracks, and set the culture for team-orientedness.)
A suspected latter, I'll play it by ear, for exactly how to see whether they checked the wiki (or did whatever is the thing everyone should know from onboarding they're supposed to do first), and try to nudge them into the right meta thinking if they need it, while also not sending the cultural message to not be very helpful.
Obviously the frequency of such events should be watched closely, but sometimes it’s a good idea to drop what you’re doing and get more directly involved.
Isn't this just ordinary politeness?
I can believe that it's not as common as it should be but it's what I usually try to do when asked a question I can't answer. Of course the amount of effort I put in depends on how important I think the question and answer might be.
Bad experiences when trying to be benevolent really take a tole on some people.
Putting it into physical space, if someone walked into the wrong office and you told them what the right office was and how to get there that would generally be considered polite. Just telling them they’re in the wrong office is probably impolite. The warm handoff is the equivalent of walking them down the hall and telling the people in the other office why you brought them there.
Having worked at a high-end hotel and on software teams with high support standards, this is very natural to me. It isn’t for others.
I'd imagine that "system supports private messages; I cannot link to them in public channels, copy-paste is the only way to share" is pretty universal. Even IRC and ICQ operated this way.
if you've got an office full of people who have good relationships with their co-workers, don't start adding new policies to your slack. just keep doing whatever is already working.
Oral tradition would work for these things, but even then it is fragile to team turnover.
Part of the appeal of hiring people with work experience at similar companies the expectation that they have all these bits of culture. That's a real value.
If your social policy needs to be enforced, then it didn’t succeed in the marketplace of ideas.
If you like this, then do it. It will catch on if it catches on. Meanwhile, there is work to do.
You think this policy is worth alienating your tech workers for? No. No, I don't believe you do. Certain other policies might. This is unenforceable and a bit insulting.
Why do you think this policy would be alienating your tech workers? Or rather what do you think the "policy" is which would be causing this alienation in your opinion?
As far as I see they recommend that if you see someone struggling and "knocking on the wrong door" help them reach the right door and add what context you can add to their situation. That just feels common sense to me. What do you find "insulting" about it?
> If you like this, then do it. It will catch on if it catches on.
I have often met the kind of entrepreneur who thinks that just building a better product is enough and that no effort should be spent on marketing.
They are wrong. Practices often will be taken up by users at a higher rate if the policies are made "official" and at a vastly higher rate if they are "marketed" via a reminder.
That said, I don't think the author's main rule scales:
> “If someone asks you a question you can’t answer, take them to someone who can answer it. If you don’t know who that is, help find someone who can.”
Setting an expectation of hand-holding a request across channels would be quite unpopular with most if not all, the technical support teams I've worked with. It can be quite a bit of effort when you're getting 10+ redirects a week, especially when the requestor hasn't done their due diligence. If my own team tried this, we would quickly become the "goto" for any domain adjacent problem. A real recipe for burn-out.
A lot depends not on the process he's advocating for but on the environment which he doesn't seem to analyze. IMO, there's no results, costs, mistakes, or trade-offs shared, so I'd be inclined to chalk this up as marketing.
However, personally I found that it is incredibly useful to use these sort of things as opportunities. The main opportunity is learning: I’ll learn something about BSOD, and about our specific IT setup, maybe some troubleshooting or windows stuff, and all this knowledge builds into strong mental models and often comes in useful even if it’s years from now.
It’s also an opportunity to build relationship (with the asker, with the IT person). It’s a tiny interaction but it makes a difference, you are now seen as “helpful” (and if you didn’t know the person at all, you got from 0 to 1 which is huge).
It’s also an opportunity to help (sometimes): as a SWE I have a breadth of knowledge, maybe I can help the IT person to have a better config to avoid BSODs, maybe I can help the asker with their specific setup that the IT person is confused about…
There’s no question that a warm handoff can be a waste, absolutely. But do it a hundred times and you get so much back
That company had a really strict 'just help anyone' policy and I'm really glad I do not work there anymore.
Doesn't matter if my intention was just "I'm just being helpful" gesture. Doing it repeatedly becomes an expectation from others that people rely on. It will be assessed in your performance, and in the bad case, it will become a standard that your team (but not others) are held to.
However, if I do think it falls under my responsibilities but then I find out for some reason it's not after learning new information or hitting a wall, then yes, I'll absolutely fill in whomever it's supposed to go to.
Good luck to any poor soul caught in the spider-web of microsofts online support as they play hot-potato with you while denying culpability, and forcing you to do all the legwork. Sending you through multiple github repos / discord / support forums where it becomes increasingly obvious these teams do not get along and want little to do with each other, let alone you.