The Team Lead Handbook · Capstone Case Studies
Capstone: Plan a Quarter With Half the Team on Support
A platform team spends half its time on requests and incidents. Plan a quarter that still delivers its most important goal.
Scenario
Example company: you lead the five-person platform team supporting twelve product teams. Next quarter's goal is to move all services to a new deployment pipeline before the old CI vendor contract ends. Your data says roughly half of the team's time goes to support and incidents.
Evidence
- Support load (last 8 weeks): 60–110 requests/week; average 18 hours/week of request work, peaks at 30; plus incidents averaging 6 hours/week.
- How support works today: everyone answers in a shared channel; no rotation; no request form.
- Top repeated requests: environment variables changes (25%), new service setup (20%), "why did my deploy fail?" (20%).
- Migration: 48 services to move; the first two took a week each with the whole team involved.
- Constraint: the old CI contract ends in 13 weeks; renewing costs a full year's fee.
Deliverables
- A support model for the quarter.
- A capacity calculation and plan for the migration.
- How you'd reduce support demand during the quarter.
- What you'd tell the twelve product teams.
Hints
- How much time does one person on rotation actually free up for the others?
- Which repeated requests could become self-service?
- Can the migration itself be made more self-service?
Draft each deliverable below before revealing the model answer and rubric.
Further reading: PagerDuty incident response · Shape Up
Deliverables
Design the support model.
Model answer
A weekly rotation: one engineer on support (requests + first-line incidents) taking no planned work; a request form as the only front door; service levels (first response within four working hours, incidents immediately); written handovers. With ~24 hours/week of support and incident load on average, one person covers most weeks; at peaks (30+ hours) a pre-agreed second person helps. Everyone else mutes the support channel.
Rubric
Look for: concentrating interruptions on one person, a single front door, service levels, a plan for peaks and handovers. Misses: keeping 'everyone helps'.
Capacity calculation and migration plan.
Model answer
Five engineers × 13 weeks = 65 engineer-weeks. Minus support rotation (13 weeks) and a peak buffer (~4), leave (~3), meetings/reviews (~15%) → about 38 engineer-weeks for planned work. Moving 48 services at "a week each for the whole team" (5 engineer-weeks per service) is impossible. So the plan must change the unit of work: spend the first 3–4 weeks building a self-service migration kit (templates, scripts, docs), migrate 5 representative services to validate it, then have product teams migrate their own services with platform office hours. Track services migrated per week and forecast weekly against the contract date.
Rubric
Look for: an honest capacity calculation showing the naive plan can't work, and a change in approach (self-service kit, product teams migrating) with weekly forecasting. Misses: 'work harder' or planning 100% capacity.
How do you reduce support demand during the quarter?
Model answer
Turn the top repeated requests into self-service: environment-variable changes through a config UI or pull-request template (25%), a service template/generator for new services (20%), and better deploy-failure messages with links to fixes (20%). The rotation engineer spends spare time on these. Report weekly request volume by type; the target is a visible drop by mid-quarter.
Rubric
Look for: using request data to target the biggest categories, owning reduction as rotation work, and measuring the effect. Misses: only adding headcount.
What do you tell the twelve product teams?
Model answer
A written announcement: the new support front door and response times; the migration timeline, the self-service kit and what each team must do by which week; office hours; the reason (contract end) and the cost of missing it. Follow up with a weekly migration status per team, so laggards are visible early, and agree escalation paths with their leads.
Rubric
Look for: clear asks with dates, the 'why', support for teams, and visible progress tracking. Misses: assuming teams will migrate without dates or help.
Open in the app to mark lessons complete, take notes and track your progress.