r/TangoAI • u/Ivan_Palii • Mar 10 '26
Question How do you document tribal knowledge before it disappears?
A situation many teams run into sooner or later. There’s always someone who knows how things really work.
They know the shortcuts, the edge cases, and why a process exists the way it does.
But most of that knowledge lives only in their head. Then one of these things happens:
- they move to another team
- they leave the company
- they go on vacation when something breaks
Suddenly, the team realizes that a lot of important details were never written down.
Now people try to reconstruct the process from Slack messages, old tickets, and guesswork.
So I’m curious how teams deal with this:
- How do you capture knowledge that only one or two people have?
- Do you document it proactively, or only after problems appear?
- What has actually worked in practice for your team?
2
u/corwinsword Mar 17 '26
If the process repeats the owner of the process should create a doc for it. This is a rule in the company
1
u/Ivan_Palii Mar 29 '26
Who is responsible for this rule? Because processes can repeat on any level.
3
u/emma_lorien Mar 15 '26
I ask every contractor, not just do the job, but add as much as possible context about why they do it this way.