Weeknotes no.9 – on written documentation.
if you’re working in a decently large organization, one common phrase will be “ask XYZ”. this may have worked on old hierarchical in-person teams, where you could walk over ask the person at lunch in the cafeteria.
however, i’d argue it’s a really bad anti pattern in a remote-first working culture with holacratic teams and flexible working hours. said person will be unavailable, out of the office, or even no longer at the company 8 out of 10 times.
but there’s documentation in Confluence?
hahaha, no.
Confluence is a black hole just like SharePoint. a good enough black hole to be fair, so you can always argue you put it in there and no one can prove the opposite… 🤡
then there’s some stuff in Notion, but oh, that other team doesn’t use that. they have it in OneNote, but you don’t have access. and that other question was “documented” in a Jira ticket comment.
the requirements changed, and corporate never caught up.
as a team that actively experiments with agentic workflows, this is so obvious!
you need context.
all the time.
most people think of documentation as this elaborate, page-long, collection of thousands of words, while in most cases the right keywords and a handful of sentences are more than enough.
a case for removing toil
“toil”, a beautiful word i learned from the folks at google roughly describes repetitive, manual tasks. answering the same questions, which could be written down, over and over again, are toil to me.
there was a good lengthy tweet recently (can’t find it anymore) asking the question “do people outside the bubble even use agents?“.
my timeline is full of it.
new platforms, tools, MCPs, mechanisms, etc.
maybe yours too, but for the majority of (knowledge) workers, likely not. there is suuuch big potential for so many use cases and we certainly just scratched the surface.
just this week there have been some mind blowing advances for agentic tools.
and they all need context how things work!
let’s keep building! 🚀