Unspicy take: Try to take a blameless post-mortem approach rather than blaming your "bottleneck" engineer, this is ultimately an organisational failure. Get p

Unspicy take: Try to take a blameless post-mortem approach rather than blaming your "bottleneck" engineer, this is ultimately an organisational failure. Get people together, go through the RCA process. Use some representative blockers. When you take a wider look at what's going on, be open to more complex explanations than might be immediately apparent. Ask whether the organisation prioritises documentation, how time is allocated for it and how that work is checked. Ask why multiple people weren't across core work that is critical to the business. If there was a team, why did the others leave? What is your onboarding process and is it giving people enough information and access to do their jobs? Does your now "bottleneck" engineer's workload permit time to answer the questions they get? And so on. I do find it surprising that engineers would wait weeks or months for an answer instead of reading code or writing a test. Why aren't the engineers engineering, it seems like a major problem? You're either talking about really subtle and deep systems here, or the code/infra is super bad, or people don't have the access (to code, or systems or test infra) they need to do their jobs, or you have major skill gaps in your team, or some combination of all these factors.