008: Team Knowledge Sharing
Establishing a culture of documentation
Thank you for joining us for today’s 5 Minute Tech Challenge! We’re so glad you’re a part our community. Today, we have Cassidy Williams, a developer advocate, educator, advisor, software engineer, and memer, sharing her knowledge about sharing knowledge. Let’s get sharing, Cassidy!
As your teams grow, so does your collective knowledge of all that you've built and learned together. Managing and documenting that knowledge can be daunting, but it's important for remembering decisions, creating new ideas without reinventing the wheel, and bringing new teammates up to speed.
Writing notes is key to understanding things
Writing down meeting minutes, notes from conversations with teammates, or even ideas that you want to propose is essential for remembering what happens throughout your day. Our brains are disorganized messes to everyone except for ourselves, and writing is the solution for that.
Plenty of studies have shown that if you want to learn and remember something long term, you need to write it down. If you want to understand ideas, you have to translate them into your own words.
Finding notes is key to recalling things
But, on the other side of that coin, searching amongst your own notes and documentation can be a challenge. You can rarely, if ever, remember exactly what you were thinking or what exact words or phrases you were using when you originally wrote down the ideas. We lose that essential context too quickly.
Thinking too much about making notes "searchable" can bog you down when you’re writing them. This isn’t productive – ideas are fleeting and can be very powerful over time if captured well. But, if you’re focusing too much on how you’ll organize them as you’re writing them down every time, you’ll lose what you want to capture, bit by bit.
You need a predictable note system
There's a principle from the book How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens: standardization enables creativity. If you have an easy-to-navigate system for your notes – a system that makes searching predictable – then whenever you want to apply your team's decisions or ideas, you'll end up spending much less energy just trying to find what you need.
Common formatting, organization, and a shared understanding of how to document things allows your team to think, discuss, reflect, hypothesize, test, and share more together. This is the creative work that matters.
The way your teams take notes is entirely up to you. As long as your team has shared buy-in and everyone uses the same approach, that's what matters. Try building templates that people can easily pull from, have "scratch pad" spots where you can jot down a quick idea and organize it later, and don't treat notes as if they're permanent, precious pieces of information.
What if you won the lottery?
There's a (pretty morbid) term called the “bus factor” when a team member has too much knowledge to themselves. I prefer a more happy one: if your teammate were to win the lottery and disappear into the sunset, would the project be in jeopardy or would the team be able to manage?
The risk of not writing things down in a searchable way means that the knowledge could go away. You don't want your teammates to not be able to take a peaceful vacation, or work on something new, or leave the team in a bad place if they win the lottery.
Establishing a culture of documentation where your team has a shared system of how and where they should write can help this. You don't need to become data hoarders (regularly auditing notes and documents as being out-of-date/archivable is a good thing), but having the context available to anyone who might need it will pay dividends over time.
What now?
It's easy to either under-document everything because there's simply too much to know and things change too often, or over-document everything and then every single page turns into a deep rabbit hole of connecting information. Finding that healthy balance is important. Here are a few resources to get you started!
How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
Coming up in two weeks, we will be learning from Sascha Strand, a Payments Platform Software Engineer at Google. Sascha will be sharing his experience with Protocol Buffers — JSON of the Future? Sounds like the future is now!
