Ask HN: How do you share knowledge within the team as you grow?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877122

by gavribirnbaum • 7 years ago

11 9 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am working on this startup and we are growing. And now it gets harder and harder to share interesting articles, company guides, etc with all people in the team and people with the same role in different teams.

Do you guys experience that issue too? What's a possible solution?

CoffeePython• 7 years ago

I’m interested in this as well. I’m work for different clients frequently and it seems like there is always so much time wasted on knowledge transfer when the client already has a system for recording these types of things.

Interestingly it seems some teams from within a company use the tools more effectively. I think it’s largely about building a culture around sharing information. Confluence is the tool I’ve seen most commonly used. I don’t have strong opinions one way or the other about it, but would like to see what tools effective teams are using

gavribirnbaum3• 7 years ago

What don't you love about Confluence? I saw a lot of teams use it, but many more complain about it. I personally have not tried it yet.

billconan• 7 years ago

its UI is not very responsive

ArtWomb• 7 years ago

It can be helpful to take a page out of gamedev / film production worlds, and create a knowledge base or "bible" as global source of truth. But again, this is a centralized solution that does not really scale well as stakeholders multiply.

More importantly I believe is in having consensus on who plays the role of "director". Having a single voice that is universally acknowledged as the final say. A Mycroft Holmes type character so to speak. Creating the digital equivalent of a data curator and strategizer may be worth pursuing.

gavribirnbaum3• 7 years ago

Why do you think that is helpful? This single source of truth document and person? Can one person really curate for the whole company?

codegeek• 7 years ago

With all the software fatigue these days, I still don't know the answer to this. It is a really hard problem. Perhaps it is something that cannot be generalized enough to sell as a SAAS etc ? I mean yes we have tried the JIRAs/confluences etc but they were so hard to use. I have the same problem right now with our team. Yes, I have looked at the notions and what not.

gavribirnbaum3• 7 years ago

And why aren't you happy with that yet? What is so hard about it? I looked at Notion as well, and it looked pretty hip, but I wasn't sure if it was just a neat design. I'm gonna take a further look.

notmainacct• 7 years ago

The main think is making sure that this communication is a priority, and that the people responsible for writing documentation understand the importance and write with empathy for the reader.

The other important part of information sharing is the form factor. If you have a bunch of micro-services and command line apps that drive your company, I like writing this info into the Readme, and manual pages for the programs. Then the access to information is tied to the places where they are relevant, and you can build a sense of where information 'belongs' within the team.

I've seen confluence and google docs used for these things as well, and aside from things like 'company policies and hr' and 'setting up your computer for new devs' external documentation often becomes out of date with the software faster.

Aside from long-term information sharing like this, I think that email and irc are a pretty optimal setup for 'faster' communication. Email is good for sharing something with groups in a quick time-frame, and irc is good for immediate communication. I personally do not like Slack because it straddles many different time frames for communication, and many of the fun features lead to productivity killing noise. Scrolling back to find a months old message on slack when it could have been a searchable email is not fun. I feel like IRC and the limitations keep people from both jumping on every notification, while also preventing messages from being sent/recieved if a party is offline creates a logical switch from a quick message to an email. I've found that people don't fail to respond to old emails in the same way that a direct message might get lost in the noise of slack.

virgil_disgr4ce• 7 years ago

Are you talking about immediately sharing things, or persisting knowledge? In the former case, are you looking for something different than, I don't know, Slack etc.?

In the latter case, documentation is critical. The only way to manage this, regardless of what app or platform you use, is to create a culture of documentation. This means that EVERYONE is habituated to documenting what they're doing and taking responsibility for what gets documented.

I use Confluence at my day job but it drives me up the $(*&ing wall sometimes with dumb little things (the search function, arguably the single most important feature, STILL doesn't search naturally across titles and contents. You have to spell out a title exactly correctly in order to find it. WTF???).

I have used Nuclino for personal work and liked it a lot, though I don't know if it does enterprise-level stuff yet, like advanced team and permissions management. It might, haven't used it in a bit.

Ask HN: How do you share knowledge within the team as you grow?

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