How to create a knowledge base as a team from day One

Why do you spend hours handpicking and building a team? To handle greater workload (obviously). But most importantly, to get your team to create magic together.

As your team expands, it learns from mistakes, builds processes and gains some best practices. It's crucial to document these into one place to effectively bring some real time mojo in the long run. This seems super obvious but it's so often overlooked. The day your small team grows three times its size, you'll be grateful you've taken the time and habit of creating a solid knowledge base.

Remember your knowledge is multi-faceted

It's time to expand your definition of team knowledge. Let go of the idea that knowledge strictly means cold, hard facts, how to's and processes. Every single piece of content that your team produces daily also constitutes your team knowledge. I'm talking about meeting notes, roadmaps, to do's etc.

Rethink your team knowledge as stock and flow. Centralize all of it and you'll trigger a natural bottom-up creation of knowledge.

That's why we built Slite as a collaborative note app. The familiar notes format is adapted to stock and flow. More importantly, it's simplicity drives your team to create knowledge every day.

Keep your team knowledge accessible

Your team's knowledge is stored away in the remote corners of a drive, intranet or even your team's individual brains. Far away from where your team’s day-to-day work is actually happening.

The fact is, knowledge evolves. That's the power of team magic: new processes emerge, new insights are brought into the overarching vision, new intuitions become full-fledged strategies. With all this excitement, it’s easy to get caught up and forget to update processes, best practices and templates.

Slite is meant for daily, interconnected use. We realized that if you create a knowledge base that's at the center of your team's workflow, it's far more likely to be leveraged and stay maintained.

Make your knowledge collaborative

Knowledge bases as we think of them feel less like collective idea-boards and more like dusty encyclopaedias. That’s because most teams create theirs in a top-down, manager-employee relation.

One of the objectives in creating your knowledge base should be for employees themselves to feed your processes with their ideas, their insights. After all, they are in the front lines. They feel the pulse of the business. And they share insights with one another around the water cooler.

Slite is built to bring the free-flowing, ease of conversation to knowledge creation and dissemination in your team. And by switching to an oral culture to a written culture for your team’s knowledge, you are much better equipped to implement new processes, publish internal release notes, onboard new teammates, and find your new, killer idea.

Slite: create a knowledge base as a team

Basically, our way of sharing knowledge on a team scale is flawed. Fixing it means expanding the way you think of knowledge, making it the center of your team’s day-to-day and building it together.

We’re taking all these issues head on with Slite: the first note app for teams. By providing a space where all your team’s content naturally turns into dynamic knowledge, we’re helping teams share and create knowledge in the simplest and most natural way.

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