Sharing knowledge and collaborating on docs: the Unow product team's processes

Unow is building a space for professional online courses that the team also happen to create in-house. The team of now 35+ employees is distributed across Paris and Lyon. We talked with Christelle, PM at Unow, to talk about how the product and tech teams integrated Slite into their workflows.

We discuss:

• The importance of writing things down
• The need for a better collaborative docs space for the product team
• Their most successful Slite use cases

Writing things down: fixed knowledge vs. collaborative documents

Everyone can and should create and share their knowledge at Unow. When Christelle joined the Product team in January, they already had places where they were writing things down: an internal wiki for "fixed knowledge" and Google Docs for "flow and collaborative docs".

The biggest issue they encountered was that flow in Google Docs were extremely difficult to handle as a team: they were losing trace of the docs and had a hard time finding the docs unless they got their hands on the link.

The issue with that is that their product specs in Drive were important sources of truths of their ongoing project's status. A doc that everyone should and would refer to, yet a hassle to access.

Setting up shop in Slite

So when they found Slite, as avid Slack users, the first reflex was to merge their flow docs into Slite. It made sense because they mirrored their channel structure in Slite with their existing one in Slack. "The same way we use Slack to talk about specific things, Slite is a place where we can work on our specs and our overall organization."

They organize their Slite channels in teams (ie. Marketing, Sales, Product...) or projects (a specific feature, for example) in the same way they've always done in Slack. It made the overall on boarding on Slite of the Product and Tech teams seamless and obvious. Most of all, as Slite becomes the only place they write up their product specs, they've created a template and it's generally easier for everyone to access and pitch in.

Use this template with your team.

"Slite allows us to go one step further on our two most important team values: team first and showing care. Since channels are public by default, everyone's informed when a new doc is created and can benefit from it," Christelle told us.

Their use of Slite goes beyond product specs: they've also put a lot of their tech process docs and general onboarding documents in Slite to begin to centralize their "fixed knowledge" and "flow docs" in one place. For example, they've started to use Slite to onboard new team members and tech processes can be found in Slite. "For our product team, Slite is our collaborative single source of truth for our specs, processes and meeting notes."