So we had this issue in my current team for some time where we are an internal development team for the business and customers love scope creep because there's no budget costs to them demanding more from us and the managers above me are incapable of setting boundaries.

I've used a variety of ways to manage this demand over the years, because of pushy department heads, stakeholders, customers, PMs and so on seem to always want to have 'just one more thing'. The latest itteration I've felt has been the most helpful to us as a team.

The current process I use, is what we call a 'Daily dev call' which is an all day meeting for all the developers and the lead for the team. We also include my direct line manager so they can drop in the call with the stupid questions they need someone technical to answer. It runs every single day from before our starting time until after our finishing time. It means our status is unavailable/in calls whenever we're dialled into it.

The policy I've put in place is if you need help, just want some social interaction (we're almost 100% remote), need to rubber duck, have a moan or ask questions then dial in and if the people/person you need doesn't join, just make it clear you're needing them when they're free. Likewise, if you just want a quiet space to work, we've got breakout rooms set up so you can sit somewhere and not be pulled into a pointless 'update' meeting or whatever, but if the team need you, then the people who matter can join you and ask questions at a point when it's helpful to the process.

We've tried the random booking in shorter meetings with yourself, and while it does work to give focus time, it's less helpful to the broader needs of the team because it's hard to know is this person in an actual important meeting, deep in focus or just trying to get something to work and wants to be left alone while they make sense of it. The benefits of our daily calls, is that we get the ability to pull the team together as a group or 1-2-1 on an ad-hoc basis. I make no bones about everyone having to be in the call all day or even at all, if you want to sit out of the call, you're welcome to do so and if needed we can drop you a message, the only expectation is you make yourself reasonably available as appropriate to progress our goals but everyone knows a request is not required to be immediate or receive a response acknowledging it.

It's got a running chat which helps to manage if people are nipping out to pick up sick kids and so on as we have flexible working hours. The running chat also helps for me as the lead, because I've found it can inform me details of what/when things happened, as instead of a million different meeting chats, most of the core stuff is in a single chat stream. Relevant files/links/folders for projects we're working on are all in the stream of messages rather than an unsorted mess of meeting chats, even worse if you break your team into smaller sub groups that the chats may not even be meetings as the lead you were in so seeing the chatter really helps. Also in external meetings the daily call gives us a good chat that as a team we can comment about the content of the meeting we're in without customers seeing us discuss how long we're going to say their 'simple request' is going to take and so forther.

For me as the lead, it's helped me see what the teams doing, improved communication between us all and made it so customers/PMs and so forth can't just doorstop us with calls demanding answers or information. The teams more productive as they can focus when they need to. We've found meeting requests have gone from being are you free in the next 30 minutes to 'when can we arrange a call'.