Every engineering team gets hit with bugs, questions, urgent requests, and “quick favors” throughout the week. Without clear ownership, these interruptions get scattered across everyone, destroying focus and killing productivity.

Someone on the team needs to own the interruptions, or the interruptions will own your team. Most teams either ignore interruptions (customers suffer) or let interruptions dominate everyone’s schedule (nothing gets built). The Guardian role solves this by making one person responsible for handling chaos so everyone else can focus.

What actually happens without a Guardian

Interruptions follow the path of least resistance. The person who’s most responsive gets hit with everything. The least busy person becomes the default troubleshooter.

This creates two problems: the responsive person becomes overwhelmed, and the “busy” people become isolated from customer reality. You end up with an unbalanced workload and poor information flow.

Bugs sit in Slack channels because no one owns triage. Urgent customer requests get lost because everyone assumes someone else is handling them.

Why rotating matters

Making someone the permanent Guardian burns them out and removes them from feature development. They become the “support person” instead of an engineer.

Rotating the role weekly keeps everyone connected to operational reality. You can’t build systems that ignore customer problems.

Different people bring different strengths to the role. Some Guardians are great at customer communication. Others excel at debugging production issues. Some build tools so they don’t have to deal with the same bug the next time they are Guardian. Rotation leverages everyone’s skills.

What the Guardian owns

Triage and assignment: New bugs, customer complaints, and urgent requests get evaluated and either handled immediately or assigned to the right person.

First response: Customers get acknowledgment within a reasonable time, even if the full solution takes longer.

Context protection: Shield the rest of the team from interruptions that don’t require their specific expertise.

Documentation: Track patterns in issues. What keeps breaking? What questions keep getting asked? What needs systemic fixes?

Escalation: Recognize when an issue needs more resources or expertise than one person can provide.

What the Guardian doesn’t own

All the work: The Guardian triages and assigns, but doesn’t have to solve everything personally. Major bugs get assigned to the person best equipped to fix them.

Perfect availability: The Guardian handles interruptions during business hours, not around the clock. Set clear expectations about response times.

Feature development: The Guardian focuses on keeping systems running, not building new features. This is a temporary role rotation, not a permanent assignment.

Make it work

Clear handoffs: Document active issues when rotating Guardian duty in case the next Guardian needs context on ongoing problems.

Response time expectations: Set clear SLAs for acknowledgment vs. resolution. “We’ll respond within 2 hours, resolve within 24 hours.”

Escalation paths:Even the best Guardian can’t solve everything by themself. Sometimes they need to escalate to the right person, at the right time.

The balance

The Guardian role should feel manageable, not overwhelming. If one person is constantly swamped, either the rotation is too slow or we have systemic issues that need addressing.

Good Guardian weeks involve few interruptions, handled smoothly. Bad Guardian weeks involve constant firefighting with no time for proactive work.

The result

Our team can focus on building features without ignoring customer problems. Issues get handled by someone who owns the response instead of falling through the cracks.

Context switching decreases for non-Guardian team members. They can work in longer blocks without constant interruption.

Everyone stays connected to operational reality because everyone rotates through the role. One person shields the team so the team can shield their focus.

Similar roles in the industry

Other engineering teams have discovered the same need for interrupt-handling roles:

Linear’s “Goalie”: Linear rotates a weekly “Goalie” role responsible for handling customer reports, fixing issues, and managing ad-hoc problems. This practice has been key to maintaining their high product quality. Read more about Linear’s approach

Wealthyhood’s “Support Engineer” Rotation: Each week, one engineer focuses specifically on customer reports and related issues, significantly improving product quality and user satisfaction.

Google’s SRE Model: Site Reliability Engineers act as the bridge between development and operations, proactively managing system reliability and handling operational interruptions so development teams can focus on building features.

Spotify’s Squad Health Practices: Teams regularly assess and manage their operational health, with rotating responsibilities for maintaining team effectiveness and handling external demands.

The pattern is consistent across successful engineering organizations: someone needs to own the interruptions, or interruptions will own the team.