How to document what your business knows

Every business runs on knowledge that has never been written down: how a difficult client prefers to be handled, why the pricing works the way it does, which supplier to call when the usual one fails.

It works until someone leaves, someone joins, or two people answer the same question differently in front of a customer.

Document by demand, not by ambition

The instinct is to document everything. That project always dies. Instead, let demand decide.

For two weeks, log every question your team asks each other. Anything asked twice gets written down. Anything asked once doesn't, yet. This produces a documentation backlog ranked by actual usefulness, at zero planning cost.

Capture by recording, not by writing

Writing from scratch is slow and it's why documentation gets postponed. Recording is fast.

Have the person who does the work best screen-record themselves doing it, narrating the decisions — not just the clicks. Transcribe it. Edit the transcript into steps. Editing is roughly four times faster than composing, and the result is more accurate because it reflects what actually happens rather than what someone thinks happens.

Use one template for everything

Consistency is what makes documentation findable. Every page:

• Purpose — one sentence
• Owner — a role, not a team
• Last reviewed — a date
• Content — steps or answers
• Related — links to adjacent pages

Name pages the way people ask questions, not the way departments are organised.

Write for the newest person

Assume no acronyms, no context, no knowledge of who to ask. But don't over-explain competence — "send the onboarding pack" is fine for a trained person.

Include the decisions, not just the actions. "Approve refunds under ₦50,000 yourself; escalate above that" is the part that actually removes work from a manager.

Test with a stranger

A document is finished when a different person can follow it without asking a question. Have them try, and mark every point where they hesitate. Those hesitations are the real content.

Keep it alive

Three rules, and they're non-negotiable:

1. 1Whoever changes a process updates the page in the same week.
2. 2Every page has an owner and a quarterly review date.
3. 3Questions get answered with links. If no page exists, write it in five minutes, then send the link.

That third rule is what turns a document library into a habit. Without it, you'll have written everything down and nobody will read it.

What this is worth

New people become productive in weeks instead of months. Answers stop varying by who replies. And the business gains the ability to explain itself without its founder in the room — which is the precondition for delegating anything meaningful.