For about a year, I was the reason half my team's questions took three days to get answered, and I didn't realize I was the bottleneck until someone said it to my face.
Every ad hoc data request went through me. Someone needed a number for a Friday meeting, they submitted a request, it sat in a queue behind four other requests, and by the time I got to it the meeting had usually already happened. I thought that queue was proof the data was being handled carefully. What it actually did was teach people to stop asking me and start building their own spreadsheets from whatever export they could get their hands on, which is a worse outcome for accuracy than the delay I was trying to prevent.
What I got wrong: I equated being the single path to an answer with being careful. They're not the same thing. Being the only person who can answer a question doesn't make the answer more trustworthy, it just makes the business slower while looking responsible.
What I know now, and what a Databricks report on enterprise AI described almost exactly: a Fortune 50 manufacturer with more than nine million data assets hit this same wall at a much bigger scale, tens of thousands of employees needing access, one small central team standing between all of them and an answer. Their fix wasn't more people in the queue, it was governed self-serve access, so the central team stopped being the path to every answer and started being the reason self-serve was actually trustworthy.
→ A backlog isn't proof of rigor, it's usually proof the access model is wrong.
→ People don't stop needing answers when you're the bottleneck, they just start getting worse ones somewhere else.
→ The real job shifted from answering every question myself to making sure the answers other people could get to on their own were actually right.
Have you ever realized you were the bottleneck in a process you thought you were protecting?
