OneUp Sales knows how important employee motivation is — their business model is based on it.

With their performance management solution being aimed at sales organizations, the team is constantly thinking about what makes someone hit — or miss — a target. OneUp Sales helps their customers boost success rates with useful data visualizations, team leaderboards, and competitions that also add fun to the daily grind of sales.

But with 35+ people working remotely around the globe, OneUp's "fun" product is also a serious business. To keep growing, Alex Wiley (Head of Product) and the rest of the leadership team needed to figure out what was making their own team tick.

Importantly, they wanted to maintain the casual, "bantering with your best friend" style that had been with them from the beginning. They didn't want to abandon their Slack-based interactions that emphasized values such as "Team-first", "Don't be a dickhead", and "Impact over effort".

So Alex started looking for a documentation system that everyone would follow and use, structuring and refining their processes while also remaining true to their existing culture.

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Their challenge: Creating engaging documentation that provides value for employees

Alex has always been the documentation evangelist at OneUp. As a self-professed "documentation nerd," he already knew the value of structuring ideas and knowledge.

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On the team level, he saw right away the downside of lack of documentation. There was no onboarding guide, and new hires were thrown into tasks and teams without any context of what they were working on or why.

So he set out to do just that, by signing up for Confluence. But he soon saw that having an ineffective documentation system was just as bad, or worse as having no documentation at all.

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Confluence was slow and "felt old." Pages took a long time to load. Templates were not useful for creating new docs. Employees didn't want to use it.

In Alex's words: "Writing documentation is a very friction-intensive process. You need to make it as easy as possible to write it."

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Eventually, he came across Slite. Writing docs in Slite was easy. It was easy to get everyone on board. And it was easy to keep knowledge fresh and up to date.

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How Slite helps OneUp Sales smooth out operations as the company matures

OneUp Sales has been using Slite for roughly a year, and they now use it for all their documentation needs. It helps keep things organized at a high company level, and for individual departments and teams.

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OneUp uses Slite in two main ways: for company-wide meetings and within each department.

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Their weekly company-wide meetings are held at the beginning of each week. They're used to review issues, generate to-dos, and monitor key metrics. All of this info is prepared prior to the meeting and stored in Slite Collections to help keep meeting short and efficient.

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Then, each department has its own channel. Each channel follows the same structure (adapted from the Divio model) to sort documents into categories:

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• References: Like a Wikipedia page, these define what something is and how it works.
• Explanations: Long-form documents that provide context for decisions, events, and strategies throughout the company's history.
• Tutorials: General education documents designed to help employees learn certain skills.
• How-tos: Step-by-step guides to individual processes, such as "How to run a product spec meeting".

Alex makes sure his Product team is meticulous about keeping everything in Slite, from roadmaps and pitches to interview notes and weekly plans. They include Sketches, Kanbans, and Collections to tie everything together.

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Results: Positive change at an organization level

OneUp has seen several positive changes since they implemented Slite a little over a year ago.

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Better onboarding

After the first new hires suffered through what Alex called "rough" onboarding, they now have a highly-documented process for starting off on the right foot.

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"[New hires] have 30, 60, 90 day plans. We host their one-to-ones. We generally get incredibly positive feedback about how it was really easy to find all the information by the end of the first week. They felt like they understood the company and how it worked and the individual departments," he said.

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More async communication

Teams that used to hold several meetings or Slack all day are now turning to asynchronous communication via docs and doc comments instead.

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"People can go in and answer questions that don't require immediate attention, on their own time," Alex observed. "Obviously the benefit of that is a reduction in the amount of lost time coming out of focus or out of flow, and then going back into flow. I'd say that's a big advantage."

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More deep thinking

Perhaps the most nuanced result, documentation via Slite has helped shift the mindset of employees, especially engineers who are used to shipping products fast.

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For developers themselves, it can even unlock career development by forcing them to present and defend their work.

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What other teams can learn from OneUp's documentation journey

As a small company that's been through several phases of documentation, OneUp has plenty of wisdom to share with others who are just getting started.

Alex recommends the following:

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• Incentivize people to write quality documents by showing instant value. In Slite, that includes using Slite Ask. The more detailed and clear your documents, the more accurate Ask's answers will be.
• Empower everyone to be a documentation expert. When first starting with Slite, Alex hosted a lunch-and-learn to show fellow employees how to document their work. When people saw how docs could save time and prevent the same questions from coming up over and over, they were sold.
• Appoint a knowledge manager. As you build more content, documentation can tend to get a bit messy. If it starts to feel like your documentation is too much, try appointing a knowledge manager. While everyone can and should feel empowered to write docs, sometimes a little oversight can keep those docs tidy and clear for everyone.

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Motivation is key

For OneUp, documentation has had a learning curve just like every other process they've developed. But as they move into a new phase of their startup journey, documentation has proved more valuable than ever to everyone on the team. The visible results, from time saved to instant insights, to better deep thinking, keeps them motivated to carry on.