How do we make time for this without blowing our roadmap?

Budget 10–15% explicitly and show it on the plan. Reduce scope elsewhere for 90 days. The payback shows up in fewer paging incidents, faster onboarding, and fewer hero bottlenecks. If leadership won’t protect the time, the program will fail.

What if our senior folks don’t want to mentor?

Tie mentoring outcomes to promotions and performance. Give them credit (and visibility) for artifacts and redundancy created. Also reduce their pager load as mentees ramp; that immediate relief changes attitudes.

Do we need Backstage or can we use Confluence?

You can start in Confluence, but you need a source of truth tied to services and ownership. Backstage makes it much easier to align docs, on-call, runbooks, and ADRs to the actual system surface area.

Can we do this fully remote?

Yes. Use recorded code tours (Loom), Sourcegraph tours, Zoom for paired sessions, and Slack bots to enforce rituals. The trick is to attach artifacts to the service catalog and enforce freshness with automation.

Culture · Oct 2, 2025 · 9 minute read

From Bus Factor 1 to 3 in 90 Days: A Mentorship Playbook for Critical System Knowledge

Your senior engineer is interviewing. Your on-call is shaky. You’ve got six months of runway and tribal knowledge everywhere. Here’s the mentorship program that actually transfers system knowledge without blowing up your roadmap.

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From Bus Factor 1 to 3 in 90 Days: A Mentorship Playbook for Critical System Knowledge

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist