A product company starts with no attendance rule at all, and for ten people that is fine. Then support moves to evening shifts, engineers join the pager rota, sellers travel to demos, and a second office opens. One engineer books a long weekend ahead of a release and gets a yes. Another is told no. The comparison happens over chai.
The purpose of a rule is cover and predictability, not policing. People should know what is allowed, and nobody should quietly absorb another person's load. Here is how to assemble one.
Three teams, three clocks
Engineers run on sprints and release trains. Sellers run on quarters and customer calls. Support agents and customer success staff run on queues and service windows. A single nine-to-six rule suits none of them.
- Engineering and design: overlap hours for standup and design review, flexibility outside them, and a pager rota with a written handover.
- Sales and pre-sales: availability for demos, travel days, and a short quarter-end window where leave needs early notice.
- Support and customer success: a roster by queue and time band, with a named backup for every shift.
Write the pager rota like an agreement between colleagues
The rota is where unfairness hides. If the same three engineers carry the pager every weekend because they live nearby or never refuse, resentment builds quietly. State the length of a turn, who may swap with whom, how a 2 a.m. page affects the next morning's start, and whether an allowance or time off in lieu applies. Whichever you choose, treat every engineer identically.
- 1
List the services and who can respond
The rota is only as wide as the group who truly understand the service, so train a second tier before widening it.
- 2
Set turn length and handover
Weekly turns with a handover note in the incident channel stop context vanishing between people.
- 3
Define rest after a night page
Settle the late start or half day beforehand. Nobody should negotiate it after a postmortem call.
- 4
Record swaps
Both people confirm in the shared calendar and the lead can see it.
- 5
Review load each quarter
Count pages per person each quarter. A lopsided tally calls for a talk, not a shrug.
Helpdesk shifts and weekend queues
Consumer products spike on weekends, festival days and the morning after a release. Draw the roster from the ticket curve rather than a flat headcount. Put one team lead on each shift as first escalation, give everyone a weekly off, and avoid moving a person from late to early shift without a rest day between.
Probation, notice and sudden absence
Small teams feel a sudden absence sharply. Say in the policy who a person informs first when they cannot log in or reach a customer, how soon, and who picks up their queue or deploy window. For sellers, state what happens to open deals during leave: a named buddy keeps the pipeline moving and the customer hears from someone familiar. For engineers, a handover note in the repository wiki, however short, saves a rushed call at midnight.
- A named buddy for every queue, release and key account.
- A shared calendar entry for every planned absence.
- A single place for emergency contacts and a line on who may call them.
Hybrid and remote work
Remote setups work when expectations are visible. Say which hours overlap with the team, how fast a message deserves a reply, and what happens when someone wants to work from a different city for a month. Approval for that last case matters, because tax, insurance and device security questions follow the person.
Holiday lists, travel and offsite weeks
Product firms often draw people from several states and run customers on several calendars. Publish the holiday list for the year in January, with the restricted holidays people may choose from. Plan offsites and hackathon weeks well ahead so that the support queue and the pager are covered while the rest of the team travels. Block the dates on the leave tool, so nobody books a flight that the rota cannot support.
Leave that does not depend on memory
Keep one record of balance, carry-forward and approvals. A simple attendance, shift and leave process with the HR system as the single source ends arguments about who asked first. Treat last-minute leave in release weeks as a planning problem. Ask for early notice then, and give the freedom back in quiet sprints.
Keeping the rule alive after launch
- Fit the rule on a single page, add three worked examples, and hand it over on day one.
- Spell out which leave leads can sign off and which goes up a level.
- Log each exception. When the same one returns three times, rewrite the rule.
- Look at consumer subscription desks, such as the B2C SaaS type, where service hours stretch further.
The SaaS and product companies hub lists neighbouring topics such as pay bands, OKRs and equity records.
