When to write it down: guidelines for remote teams

If you are a small team with goals for growth, it’s unlikely you have enough time or energy to document your processes. Chances are that a formal process doesn’t even exist yet.

Because the team is small, having the next new person update the documentation doesn’t really work because it gets used so rarely. Or that person doesn’t have the full picture, they don’t know what’s been tried before.

So I followed another lightweight rule of thumb — If you need to repeat something more than 3 times *in recent memory* it needs to be packaged into a product that others can use and consume.

Other signs it’s time to productize your documentation sound like:

• “Do we have a process for this?”

• “How do I get access to ___?”

• “What is the long-term vision for ___?”

Remote work requires more documentation, period. Being asked to write things down can cause quite a bit of stress and be a distraction — frame this as saving your future self time.

We can call this method “just enough documentation.”

Your investment into internal communication should be commensurate with:

• the number of people who need to use it regularly

• the importance of the info documentation to your team’s strategy

For example, if you are a service organization, you’re going to need to keep your team’s docs ship-shape — lots of people use it.

A few examples of “productized” documentation

• Keeping one slide deck with your team’s core mission/vision, stats, roadmap and customer stories. Anyone could access and use this — I kept it on the shared drive.

• Templates for onboarding. These were checklists of who to connect with, and in the order we wanted you to complete the tasks.

• Meeting notes. Every standing meeting had its own document with consistent segments for the agenda.

• README’s for the team with a protocol of who to contact for what. Change these as part of the off boarding checklist for team members.

• Another example I like for it’s concretenesss

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