Writing is Compounding
A recently-hired colleague at work shared an insight with me this week that hadn’t dawned on me before: onboarding is 80% self-directed learning and 20% tapping into tribal knowledge. Wouldn’t it be great if the tribal knowledge was documented, accessible, and structured?
Yes recently-hired colleague, yes it would!
The discussion reminded of an episode from my Twitter days, when a tongue-in-cheek wiki comment was taken seriously. I had written the first onboarding wiki on Confluence for the technical PM team, and someone who was in the middle of onboarding read and it said a bunch of things were missing. So I updated the wiki with a comment at the bottom:
“if you think something is missing from this wiki, feel free to add it yourself”
I was at Twitter for over 5 years, and I don’t think I looked at that wiki again till my last week. Guess what? People took the comment seriously, and had been adding to it. Every new hire (~ 50 people over 5 years) layering insight after nugget. It was the collective in-house and long-lost knowledge base of the techincal PM team, available to read in < 30 minutes for any new hire.
This is more than a warm and fuzzy story. This is one of the realities of writing: it compounds.
Whether it’s an onboarding doc that’s updated by every new hire or a product brief that goes through a series of reviews or an incident post-mortem that’s studied by every on-call, the act of writing, sharing, and editing is critical to an organization that wants to learn.
I woke up this morning (and for the last 10 days) not really wanting to write. But I wanted to get this thought out there - here’s hoping it compounds…
I’d love to hear from readers about their onboarding journeys - please chime in via comments👇. And if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing.
further reading / references
some previous musings on writing as thinking, creating, and connecting
product choices, like writing, also compound into customer value
many organizations have turned a culture of writing into a superpower
childish drawing / interpretation
So Slack provides history, depending on access, whereas new employees typically show up to an empty inbox. Some places seed the inbox with important messages, but these tend to be company-wide stuff, not the truly important issues (why was a decision made). The first 90 days are really about establishing context, normally of the personality variety. Onboarding wikis should accelerate the time-to-context. A person still needs to put the info in context for their role. Totally agree that everyone should be involved in writing, editing, and improving the stuff that matters to their roles. Also, as an aside, as a new employee it's important to understand why a certain path is being pursued and the reasons others weren't... this is where storytelling (which you've written about before) comes in. Keep it up!!!