---
title: "How We Spread Engineering Knowledge & Culture Across Intercom"
description: "Large engineering organizations often face siloed knowledge and culture as teams focus on their own domains. Intercom addresses this with engineering tours, where engineers temporarily transfer to another team to work on a specific project, such as building a scalable solution for database performance issues. New engineers go on tour within their first few months, and all engineers are encouraged to tour at least once a year. Tours are designed with a mentor and can be feature-oriented, shipping a new product or tool with a demo at the weekly Show and Tell, or tech-debt oriented, fixing bugs or performance issues. Beyond code, tours build relationships and spread culture across offices in Dublin, London, and San Francisco, and the concept has expanded to other departments like Customer Support and Marketing; engineers bring back learnings to their home teams."
---

# How We Spread Engineering Knowledge & Culture Across Intercom

[Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom) · Oct 9, 2026

**Type:** Problem & solution

## Summary

Large engineering organizations often face siloed knowledge and culture as teams focus on their own domains. Intercom addresses this with engineering tours, where engineers temporarily transfer to another team to work on a specific project, such as building a scalable solution for database performance issues. New engineers go on tour within their first few months, and all engineers are encouraged to tour at least once a year. Tours are designed with a mentor and can be feature-oriented, shipping a new product or tool with a demo at the weekly Show and Tell, or tech-debt oriented, fixing bugs or performance issues. Beyond code, tours build relationships and spread culture across offices in Dublin, London, and San Francisco, and the concept has expanded to other departments like Customer Support and Marketing; engineers bring back learnings to their home teams.

## Context

Intercom’s engineering blog describes their engineering tours program, a practice where engineers temporarily transfer to other teams to spread knowledge and culture across the organization.

## Approach / What changed

Engineering tours involve engineers temporarily transferring to another team to work on a specific project, with two types: feature-oriented (shipping a new product or tool) and tech-debt oriented (fixing bugs or performance issues). Tours are designed with a mentor, and new engineers go on tour within their first few months; all engineers are encouraged to tour at least once a year. Tours also span offices in Dublin, London, and San Francisco.

## Takeaways

- Engineering tours are part of onboarding and ongoing learning; new engineers go on tour within their first few months, and all engineers are encouraged to tour at least once a year.
- Tours can be feature-oriented, shipping a new product or tool with a demo at the weekly Show and Tell, or tech-debt oriented, fixing bugs or performance issues.
- Tours build relationships and spread culture across offices in Dublin, London, and San Francisco, and the concept has expanded to other departments like Customer Support and Marketing.

## FAQ

### What is an engineering tour at Intercom?

An engineering tour involves an engineer temporarily transferring to another team to undertake a specific project in that team's domain. For example, a front-end engineer may work on a back-end team building an infrastructure tool.

### How are engineering tours designed?

Tours are designed with a mentor and can be feature-oriented, shipping a new product or tool, or tech-debt oriented, fixing bugs or performance issues. The engineer typically demos the feature at the weekly Show and Tell.

### Are engineering tours only for new hires?

No, engineering tours are not just for onboarding. All engineers are encouraged to go on tour with a different team at least once a year to ensure continuous learning and knowledge transfer.

**Tags:** [Engineering Management](https://yomu.fyi/topic/engineering-management), [Knowledge Management](https://yomu.fyi/topic/knowledge-management), [Onboarding](https://yomu.fyi/topic/onboarding), [Teamwork](https://yomu.fyi/topic/teamwork)

- Source: [Intercom](https://www.intercom.com/blog/engineering-tours)
- Source URL: https://www.intercom.com/blog/engineering-tours
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-10-09T12:01:51.187Z

[Read original post](https://www.intercom.com/blog/engineering-tours)