Every product company has the same unspoken habit: When leaders can’t find the information they need, they go straight to the people who can. And too often, that means engineers.

Executives are not handing investor updates to engineers. The asks that land on engineering look different. Understand the number of churned customer. Compile a full incident timeline from scattered service notes and chat logs. Gather every customer support exchange linked to a high-profile account. Trace the decision history behind a product change buried across tickets, specs, and email threads. Pull together the full paper trail for a compliance review.

These requests skip BI entirely: they live in documents, conversations, and historical context. And the only people who can reliably find, connect, and reconstruct that story across systems are senior ICs.

Why leaders keep asking instead of finding

Finding the right answer is hard. Knowledge sits in DMS folders, wikis, SharePoint, CRM, PM tools, logs, and old slides. People search, hop tools, and DM whoever might know. Studies repeatedly show a large chunk of the workday goes to searching and gathering information. McKinsey reported roughly one fifth of time spent on searching, and more recent workplace surveys place it at about two hours per day. Traditional self‑service analytics has not solved this. Adoption of BI tools among intended users remains low, and the share of employees who actually use BI tools is roughly a quarter on average. Low usage keeps leaders dependent on ad hoc requests to experts who can traverse systems.

The hidden tax on engineering attention

Two hours a day pulled into data hunts adds up. Use a simple, conservative model. Typical developer time is commonly benchmarked near 80 dollars per hour. In a 100 engineer org, two hours per day diverted to ad hoc data work is roughly 16,000 dollars per day, or about 4 million dollars wasted each year assuming 240 workdays.

Interruptions compound the tax. Regaining focus after an interruption takes about 23 minutes. Even one additional reporting interruption per day costs about 92 hours per engineer per year. At the same hourly benchmark, that is roughly 760,000 dollars per year across 100 engineers on focus loss alone.

This is not the cost of building robust internal platforms or enduring compliance work. It is the penalty for fragmented knowledge and one‑off answers.

The cultural trap

Leaders need speed and certainty, and they often don’t have the tools, access, or context to know where every answer lives. Nor should they. Their job is to decide, not to dig through half a dozen systems. So they turn to the people who can guarantee a correct answer. Engineers oblige because saying no feels slower or risky. BI teams scramble to keep up with tickets. The loop persists because the path of least resistance is still a direct message, not a single, trusted place to find and verify the answer.

What good looks like

Self‑service must mean two things: find and trust. People need to locate the right materials across systems in minutes, see provenance and context, and turn that into a narrative or table without opening six tools. When that is true, reporting becomes a byproduct of the work, not a parallel workload for experts.

How Phlow breaks the loop

Phlow connects your existing systems into a single knowledge network, then puts answers and reporting on top of it.

• Unified knowledge graph: Documents, past work, decisions, people, and data references linked across SharePoint, wikis, drives, CRM, project tools. One place to start, with cross‑source context.
• Answer first search: Ask a question in natural language and get an evidence‑linked answer. Inspect the sources before you paste the result into a deck.
• Instant executive reports: Generate a concise report from what Phlow already knows. Use templates for board updates, renewal briefs, incident reviews, and product health summaries. Edit the narrative, ship the artefact.
• Governance that fits your model: Open by default or security‑first. Phlow respects roles and sensitivity while keeping non‑sensitive knowledge accessible.

 

The payoff

• Time back: Reducing time spent searching by even a third aligns with published research on collaborative tech and translates into hours returned to building. 
• Real money: Just two hours per week reclaimed across 100 engineers is on the order of millions per year, before counting the interruption tax.  
• Happier teams: Engineers ship. Leaders self‑serve. BI focuses on durable models and metrics, not ticket triage.
• This is just a part of Phlow: Search and report generation are only a part of what Phlow can deliver from your enterprise knowledge.

 

Stop paying the hidden engineering tax. Stop waiting days for answers that should take minutes.

With Phlow, your leadership gets instant access to the knowledge they need, your engineers stay focused on building, and your company stops bleeding time and money on avoidable reporting work.

If you’re ready to protect your most expensive resource — and give every decision the speed and certainty it deserves — it’s time to put Phlow to work.