Documentation

Every growth team has the same knowledge problem. Important information lives in people's heads, scattered docs, and Slack messages from eight months ago. New team members take months to get up to speed. When someone leaves, their knowledge leaves with them.

Documentation tools solve this by giving knowledge a home. When processes, decisions, and learnings are written down and findable, the team stops re-solving solved problems and starts building on what's already known.

The challenge is maintenance. Most documentation efforts start strong and then decay. Pages go stale. Nobody trusts what's written. People revert to asking questions instead of reading docs.

This chapter covers documentation tools that work for growth teams, where you need lightweight capture that people will actually maintain, not enterprise knowledge management that requires a dedicated admin.

Process documentation captures how recurring work gets done. Campaign launch checklists, experiment workflows, and reporting processes should be documented so anyone can follow them without asking questions.

Decision logs record why choices were made. Six months from now when someone asks why you chose that positioning or killed that campaign, the reasoning should be findable. This prevents relitigating old decisions.

Onboarding materials help new team members ramp faster. When everything they need to know is documented, they spend less time asking basic questions and more time contributing.

Playbooks encode what works. When you figure out a winning approach to LinkedIn ads or sales sequences, write it down so the whole team can replicate it instead of just the person who discovered it.

Easy editing encourages updates. If documentation is hard to create or modify, people won't do it. The tool should feel closer to a word processor than a content management system.

Good organisation through folders, tags, or hierarchies makes information findable. Documentation that exists but can't be found is barely better than no documentation at all.

Permissions let you share appropriately. Some docs are internal only. Others need to be visible to clients or partners. Granular sharing without complexity is the goal.

Templates reduce friction for common document types. Meeting notes, project briefs, and experiment logs should have pre-built structures so people don't start from blank pages.

Consider where your team already works. If you're heavy Notion users for project management, documentation probably belongs there too. Consolidation beats best-of-breed for most teams.

Evaluate the editing experience. Some tools optimise for reading over writing. You want something that makes creation fast and updates easy, or documentation will always be a chore.

Think about search seriously. As documentation grows, findability becomes the bottleneck. Test search with realistic queries and see if you can actually find things.

Check collaboration features. Commenting, suggestions, and version history matter when multiple people contribute to the same documents. Real-time collaboration is valuable for some teams, unnecessary for others.

Documentation is a habit, not a project. The best tool in the world won't help if your team doesn't build the discipline to write things down and keep them updated.

Start with high-value, high-frequency documentation. The processes you run every month, the questions new hires always ask, the decisions that keep getting relitigated. Get those documented first, build the habit, then expand from there.