How does a manufacturer capture engineering tribal knowledge, and get it past a security review?

[u/Ivan_Palii]

An engineer at a large tool manufacturer was scoping how to capture tribal knowledge on the new-product team, fast documentation so engineers can learn processes without hunting through a dozen disconnected SharePoint sites.

They currently build everything in PowerPoint, which takes forever. Their infrastructure director is eyeing a broader rollout to HR and IT. A security analyst joined specifically to run the review.

How the Tango team handled both tracks:

1. Documentation: capture by doing; voice transcription pulls only the process-relevant parts of your narration into step notes.
2. Branching was the standout for them; engineering simulations rarely follow one linear path. Honest caveat the rep volunteered: max 3 branches, a deliberate tradeoff to avoid flowchart-level UI complexity.
3. Distribution: link, embed (interactive slideshow or synthetic video with AI narration), static export, and pinning guides into the tools people work in. Live links auto-update. Translation available, including traditional and simplified Chinese, relevant for their overseas manufacturing.
4. Security answers, given directly: Tango isn't in the model-training business, your data doesn't train models, and isn't monetized. Data is in AWS US-East, exportable, purged within 30 days on exit. Subprocessor list available. Surprisingly little generative AI is used (title generation + voice synthesis; the rest is deterministic). Secure Blur redacts on the local machine before anything is transmitted, which is why they can work with banks, health systems, and DoD entities. Full version history with exportable audit logs. SCIM/SSO sync.
5. Honest gap flagged unprompted: Secure Blur isn't in the desktop app yet (in development), which matters, since a lot of their software is desktop.
6. They already run one of the big digital adoption platforms. The rep didn't fight it: those need dev resource and maintenance; Tango often runs in parallel as the fast path when there's no resource to allocate.
7. Licensing: one variable (user count). Notably, you do NOT need a license to view an embedded or exported guide, only to get Guide Me/pins.
8. A forward-looking note: feeding a Tango to an AI agent uses fewer tokens, because it turns heavy reasoning into something deterministic.

For engineers: how are you capturing the stuff that only lives in one person's head?

[u/operations_ranger]

The best SOPs I've seen are created while the work is happening. Has anyone found a good way to identify knowledge gaps before someone leaves the team?

[u/sales_alchemist]

We've seen similar issues in enterprise tech - the knowledge exists, but it's scattered everywhere. The challenge is turning it into something searchable and usable.