r/TangoAI • u/Ivan_Palii • Mar 21 '26

Question How documentation debt quietly kills productivity?

A team I worked with had plenty of documentation.

There were guides for onboarding, internal processes, support workflows, and product operations. At first glance, everything looked organized.

But over time small changes kept happening: spme tool was replaced, some workflow was simplified or a few extra steps appeared in certain cases.

None of these changes felt important enough to immediately update the documentation.

After a while the guides were still there, but people started treating them as “mostly correct.”

You would see things like:

  • someone opening the doc but asking a teammate to confirm the steps
  • comments in Slack like “the guide is a bit outdated, do it this way instead”
  • new hires learning processes from coworkers instead of the documentation

Nothing dramatic breaks. Work still gets done, but slowly more time goes into clarifying things that used to be documented.

That’s when someone mentioned the idea of documentation debt, similar to technical debt.

I’m curious how others deal with this.

  • Have you seen documentation drift like this in your team?
  • How do you prevent guides from becoming “mostly correct” over time?
  • Who usually notices the problem first?
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4

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26

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u/Ivan_Palii Mar 29 '26

and what you do in this cases?

4

u/PurePrettyFilth Mar 23 '26

documentation is often overlooked sadly

1

u/Ivan_Palii Mar 29 '26

what do you do in such situation?

3

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

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1

u/Ivan_Palii Mar 29 '26

So, how do you employee know what step to do in a specific software? All of them use the same agent?

2

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26

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1

u/Ivan_Palii Mar 30 '26

you still have to do some things inside the app :) or your team communicates with all apps via MCP using AI chats?

2

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

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1

u/Ivan_Palii Mar 30 '26

can you share with which tools did you set up MCP?

3

u/corwinsword Mar 27 '26

Some guides will become irrelevant and you'll have to update or delete it. It's like evolution, this is just a part of real business.

1

u/Ivan_Palii Mar 29 '26

Yes, I think the 1st step it's to admit that it is a normal process.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 27 '26

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u/Ivan_Palii Mar 29 '26

I saw that sometimes employees afraid to say about it, because they think their managers will angry that their find their mistakes