Today, you can use an app to place a grocery order and have it at your door within the space of two hours. But when you try to ask your lead developer a question about a potential product feature, it can take several days to a week to get a response.
Why is there such a lag time? It’s not that they’re ignoring you—often, your development team may be as stumped as you are.
They might need to spend hours compiling research from the internet or Stack Overflow, or asking fellow developers in different time zones over chat threads. Despite all the communication and research tools they have access to, they’re not able to aggregate all of their knowledge in one place.
In order to get faster feedback from your development team, you need a better system for internal knowledge sharing. Often, the answers are within reach—they just don’t know where to look or who to ask for support. And if the knowledge gatekeepers are busy or are taking time off, that can cause significant delays in getting your developers the information they need.
If you want to help your developers get unstuck, it’s crucial to provide them with access to a knowledge-sharing platform where the entire organization can share and discuss technical resources and information. On such a platform, they can post questions, which their teammates and subject-matter experts throughout the company can answer for them. Other colleagues can add their own perspectives to the threads, and the most relevant or useful information can be voted up. Such tools can also provide search and tagging functionality, so that it’s simple to find relevant information based on a specific keyword, or a technology or product name.
By providing your development team with a unified resource hub, they’ll be able to easily draw on your company’s existing institutional knowledge to answer questions more quickly—enabling your team to increase its agility and speed of innovation.
