You’re Not the Hub. You’re the Bottleneck.

The Slack notification pops up. It’s a sales director asking for the ETA on a feature. You fire back a quick answer. Another one from marketing, wondering about the final copy for a tooltip. You ping the designer. An engineer DMs you a question about an API endpoint that you need to relay to a different engineering team. For a moment, you feel essential. You are the hub, the central node through which all information flows.

This feeling is a trap. You’re not the hub. You’re the bottleneck.

Every question you personally field, every connection you manually make, is a tax on the entire team’s momentum. You’ve made yourself the single point of failure in the system, and the system is starting to lag.

The Allure of the Human Router

We don’t do this on purpose. The habit starts small. It feels efficient to give a quick answer. It feels helpful to connect two people. It feels like you’re protecting your team’s focus by acting as a gatekeeper for incoming requests.

Soon, the organization learns the pattern. "Just ask the PM" becomes the default path for everything. You get pulled into conversations about minor design tweaks, backend architecture, and marketing campaign timelines. You’re spending your days routing information instead of shaping the product.

The real problem isn’t the volume of questions. The problem is that you’ve trained everyone, including your own team, that you are the only one with the context. You’ve created a system of dependence that doesn’t scale beyond your own personal bandwidth.

From Bottleneck to Broker

Breaking this cycle isn’t about working more hours or typing faster. It’s about redesigning the communication system around you. Your goal is not to answer every question, but to make yourself unnecessary for most of them.

Here’s how to start.

1. Make Deliberate Introductions, Not Deliveries

When someone from another team asks you a question that your designer or engineering lead can answer, your instinct is to get the answer and relay it back. Resist this.

Instead, pull the relevant person into the conversation. Don’t just pass the message. Make the connection.

• Bad: “Let me check with the engineer and get back to you.”
• Good: “Great question. Looping in @EngineerName, who is the expert on this part of the system. They’ll have the best answer for you.”

You’ve just done two things. You solved the immediate problem, and you taught the organization who the real expert is. The next time, they’re more likely to go directly to the source. You’re building new, more efficient pathways for information.

2. Move from Private DMs to Public Channels

Direct messages create information silos. A decision made in a DM is invisible to the rest of the team, forcing you to constantly rebroadcast context.

Be ruthless about moving conversations into the open. Create dedicated, cross-functional channels for your product area (e.g., #proj-checkout-experience). When you get a project-related DM, your default response should be to move it