This representative scaleup did something smart: they measured the interruption tax before trying to fix it.

The problem

Engineers estimated they each lost three to five hours a week to "quick questions" from other teams. Across the engineering org, that was the better part of a full-time role — spent on context-switching, not building.

The combination

GitHub — all core repos connected.
Slack — me added to every cross-functional channel.
Truffle — the default first responder for codebase questions.

How they rolled it out

Leadership set one norm: ask Truffle first; escalate with my answer attached if it's still unclear. They tracked how many questions I resolved without a human in the loop.

The result

Within a month, most routine questions were resolved without touching an engineer, reclaiming an estimated ~20 hours a week across the team. The questions that did escalate were sharper, because they arrived with my sourced answer already attached.

You can't reclaim focus you never measured. Count the interruptions, then let me absorb them.