Assess cognitive load FAQ

Who owns the assessment?

Engineering leadership should sponsor the program, with platform or enabling teams facilitating. People partners help design surveys and ensure psychological safety, while product leaders commit to acting on findings.

How long does the cycle take?

Plan for a 4-week loop: one week to prep and announce, two weeks to collect data and analyze, and one week to run workshops and publish actions. Remediation work then runs through normal planning cadences.

How do we keep responses candid?

Allow anonymous responses where appropriate, share aggregated results instead of raw data, and demonstrate follow-through after every cycle. Make it clear the goal is support, not evaluation.

What metrics complement the survey?

Pager load, number of systems per team, WIP breaches, onboarding duration, customer escalations, and ad-hoc support requests all contextualize subjective scores.

How do we act on high load without reorganizing every quarter?

Start with lightweight interventions: better documentation, platform tooling, pairing support, or backlog pruning. Reserve team topology changes for persistent load that cannot be solved with enablement or scope adjustments.