Protecting engineering time
When I was leading engineering at a high growth startup, my team spent roughly half their time not engineering. The fix isn't making engineers better at handling interruptions. It's stopping the interruptions.
I'm on a mission to save software engineering.
Not all of it. Just the good parts: the problem solving, the creativity, the moment when something finally works. When I was leading engineering at a high growth startup, my team spent roughly half their time not engineering. Fielding questions from support, fielding questions from sales, fielding questions from CS and product. Fixing one-off customer issues. Running queries someone needed for a presentation. Context-switched to death, not doing the work they actually loved.
Most tools try to make engineers better at handling these interruptions. That's the wrong problem.
Pebble sits in every Slack channel, Intercom queue, and Jira board, answering questions, running queries, updating docs, fixing issues. Engineers only get pulled in when Pebble genuinely needs their input. The rest gets handled.
Our customers typically get back two weeks of engineering time in our onboarding call. The onboarding call is thirty minutes.
That number surprises people. It shouldn't. Two weeks of recovered time is just what happens when you stop routing every data question and every minor bug and every "can someone check this" through an engineer who's trying to ship a feature.
The goal isn't to make engineers faster at support. It's to stop pulling them into support at all.
Not to replace engineers. To protect them.