How do you stop being the person who knows?

In short

For years, people on my team brought their accessibility questions to me.
It felt useful. It also meant the team never had to learn the answers.
What fixed it was writing the answers down in the place where the work happens.
Near the end is what I would tell someone in the same position.

For a long time, the best part of my week was being asked a question.

Can you take a quick look at this? Does this pass? What is the rule about focus?

I led ten designers and researchers at UKG. Five thousand organizations used our products. Every day, a lot of questions came to one desk, and it was mine.

It felt like being useful. It was also the reason nothing changed.

Being asked feels like being senior

Being the one everybody asks doesn't feel like a problem. It feels like being senior.

None of us sees ourselves as the thing slowing a team down. What I saw was a full calendar and a good reputation. I liked being needed.

But asking me took four minutes, and learning the answer took an afternoon. Busy people take the four minutes. My team did, every time, for years.

So the team never learned it. Asking me was always cheaper.

It also rewarded me. Each answer made me look a little more important. And as long as I kept answering, nobody else had to hold the knowledge.

The people who never asked paid for it

Some questions reached my desk. Many more decisions never did. They were made in meetings I wasn't in, or on days when I was booked. They were made by people who didn't know there was a question to ask.

Those people decided sensibly, with what they had. What they had did not include anything that was only in my head.

So the work that excluded people was not the work I reviewed. It was the work next to it:

a control that was named in a hurry
a color picked in a file at five o'clock
a flow that looked fine, and that nobody had tried with only a keyboard

Nobody tried that flow because the person who always asks about keyboards was in another meeting. That person was me.

When one person holds the knowledge, nobody can reach it while the organization is busy. An organization is busy most of the time. It is busiest when the decision matters.

One part of this I still find hard to think about. If I had left, the knowledge would have left with me.

Two years of judgment would have gone in the few weeks of a notice period. The team would have started again from the beginning. They would not have known which questions were already settled.

Writing it down fixed it

It had to be written somewhere it has consequences.

At ClearCo we keep three things as plain text files:

the design rules
the accessibility standard
the writing guidelines

They sit in the repository, which is the shared place where the product's code is kept. People are already there when a question comes up. They are not in a wiki, a slide deck or a chat channel.

Some of the rules also fail the build. The build is the automatic step that checks the code before it can be released. If a rule is broken, the work stops until someone fixes it.

That is what gives a rule weight. A rule with a check behind it gets followed. A rule in a document gets compared with the deadline, and sooner or later the deadline wins.

The sentence I'm proudest of from that time is a plain one:

The platform conformance target is now answerable from the repository rather than from me.

The conformance target is the accessibility standard the product has to meet. It's a small sentence. It took a year.

Taste is hard to write down

Writing it down was harder than doing the work.

Much of what I knew was taste more than knowledge, and taste is hard to write down. When I sat down to state a rule, what I often had was "I would know it when I saw it."

Some of that was real judgment. That part does need a person.

A lot of it was something else. It was a decision I had made once, years ago. I could no longer remember the reason. I had kept applying it ever since, as confidently as if it were a principle.

There is a second difficulty. We don't say it out loud in our field as often as we should.

If we are valued for being the person who knows, then writing it down feels like giving our value away.

I felt that. I don't think it's shameful to have felt it. It is also wrong.

The answers were never what made me valuable. What made me valuable was noticing that there was a question.

Nobody has automated that. And once the answers are written down, we are free to go and notice questions somewhere new.

Four things help someone in the same position

Start with the questions you answer in four minutes. If you can answer without thinking, the question should not need you. Write those answers down first. Put them where the work is. Give the most important ones a check that fails.
Write down the taste as well as the rule. "The accent marks selection and nothing else" is worth more than a color code. That one sentence answers the next twelve questions.
Let someone else answer badly. A colleague will answer a question less well than you would have. The first few times, say nothing. Correct it once, and everyone goes back to asking you.
Check whether fewer questions reach you. Give it two quarters, which is six months. If people still ask you the same things, they could not find what you wrote. Treat that as a design failure and not as a discipline problem.

This is a distribution problem

When one person holds the accessibility knowledge, we have made a design decision. We have decided when that knowledge is available: sometimes, on request, to people who already know to ask.

I don't see that as a training problem, or as a problem of too few people. The knowledge is not reaching the people who need it. That is a distribution problem. It is ours to fix, and it is much cheaper to fix while we are still there.

Think back to the last question someone brought to your desk, and how quickly you answered it. If the answer came that fast, it is ready to be written down.