Cribl: “Unblocked is our number one tool for finding the information we should know but don’t.”

September 24, 2024

Cribl, the Data Engine for IT and Security, helps enterprises unlock the full potential of their data. Its powerful data engine empowers IT and security teams to build globally distributed infrastructures capable of processing billions of events per second. Today, 24% of Fortune 1000 companies use Cribl, making it one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies.

From its founding, Cribl has remained a remote-first organization, fueled by its belief that great work can happen anywhere. Cribl’s remote work environment expands its talent pool and empowers its employees with flexibility, but with more than 100 engineers working across different time zones on a large, shared codebase, keeping everyone on the same page can be a real challenge. This issue was further exacerbated by fragmented knowledge spread across multiple tools, often creating bottlenecks for routine tasks.

To address this issue, Olli Draese, Technical Architect at Cribl, introduced Unblocked to the engineering team in 2022. The tool instantly gained traction. “Unblocked has been a game-changer for our team,” Olli explains. “Instead of waiting for someone to reply to my Slack message, I can instantly find what I need. It saves time, doesn’t bug my coworkers, and spares me the headache of figuring out who to ask. It’s a win-win.”

Before: Siloed knowledge and dependencies

In 2018, Cribl began as a small, co-located team of four engineers in the Bay Area, where knowledge sharing was effortless. As the company quickly grew, maintaining shared context became trickier. “Having everyone in the same Zoom at the same time didn’t make sense given our flexible working hours,” Olli says. “Plus, with the introduction of specialties like backend and frontend engineering, not all context was relevant to everyone, which made it tough to share knowledge across the team effectively.”

Initially, the team attempted to solve this challenge by reducing task dependencies, but this created information silos. “People stopped talking to each other, meaning knowledge was stuck in people’s heads rather than shared across the team. This wasn’t ideal for the team’s long-term health,” Olli explains. They then shifted to a collaborative model, assigning mini-teams to epics and relying on documentation to bridge knowledge gaps. However, this solution created new challenges. Crucial information was scattered across Slack, Confluence, and Pull Requests, making it onerous to locate. With limited search capabilities in each tool and no integrations between them, team members often struggled to know where to start looking for information. Asking remote colleagues for help in Slack sometimes meant waiting hours for answers.

This fragmentation particularly impacted onboarding. “We aim for new hires to be self-sufficient,” Olli says. “But our existing systems made it hard for them to find context independently.” As a result, new employees turned more frequently to their onboarding buddies for assistance, which made it challenging to quickly become self-sufficient. New hires sometimes had to wait extended periods to receive responses. Meanwhile, their buddies, who naturally couldn’t recall every detail, were forced to sift through Confluence for the appropriate documentation to answer a new hire’s questions.

“Unblocked has been a game-changer for our team. Instead of waiting for someone to reply to my Slack message, I can instantly find what I need. It saves time, doesn’t bug my coworkers, and spares me the headache of figuring out who to ask. It’s a win-win.”

Olli Draese — Technical Architect at Cribl

After: Instant answers and new insights

Olli introduced Unblocked to his team after hearing about it from a colleague. “The team experimented with it independently, without any push from me,” he notes. It quickly became popular among engineers at all levels, who used it as a search engine to gain context quickly on Cribl’s codebase without disturbing others.

As Unblocked’s popularity grew, it became an essential part of Cribl’s workflow, especially in streamlining onboarding. “Unblocked is now one of the first links in our onboarding guide,” Olli says. It’s become new hires’ first line of defense for questions, reducing the load on onboarding buddies and accelerating ramp-up time.” This shift has allowed Cribl to scale its remote engineering team while maintaining high productivity.

What’s more, Unblocked also helps senior team members ship faster. “Even as a tenured engineer, it’s hard to remember why certain things were done or identify relevant code across our shared codebases,” Olli explains. “Unblocked searches across platforms, providing quick answers and showing relevant sources. The latter is especially groundbreaking, as it allows any engineer to review all relevant discussions to get complete context rather than a binary answer.”

This contextual search can lead to surprising discoveries, especially given the complexity of the team’s infrastructure. Olli shares an example: “Unblocked helped me discover pre-existing functionality in another part of the codebase for one of my projects. I easily merged it into my branch, which saved hours of development time.”

A remote team’s secret weapon

Two years into their journey with Unblocked, Olli attributes much of the success to its organic adoption within the team. “Engineers love a new playground,” he explains. “When introducing a new tool, instead of mandating it, let them try it out. If it offers real value, as Unblocked has for us, they’ll naturally keep using it.” (Take a look at our getting started guide to see how to set up Unblocked for your team).

Looking to the future, Olli sees Unblocked as a crucial resource in scaling their engineering team without compromising efficiency or their remote-first culture. “We don’t question Unblocked. We just use it. It’s proved its value time and time over,” Olli says. “It’s our number one tool to find information we should know but don’t. As we grow and expand, we’re eager to explore new ways to leverage Unblocked.”

Get in touch with us today to see how you can get the same results, and more, with your team.