Tips for sharing knowledge across an organization

As organizations and product teams grow, sharing knowledge and keeping everyone aligned becomes increasingly difficult. This lack of alignment on key learnings leads to:

• Duplicated research efforts
• Suboptimal solutions
• Repeating past mistakes

Although most companies try to combat this challenge with knowledge repositories, this solution is far from optimal.

In this article, you’ll learn where the current knowledge-sharing approach falls short and what alternatives to use.

The problem with knowledge repositories

The classical approach to knowledge management in product development usually focuses on documenting learning in some sort of knowledge repository. An example could include a Confluence space with all learnings organized as separate files in a chronological or feature-based order.

The biggest problem with that approach is that hardly anyone reads it. Although it’s sometimes useful, specifically when someone wants to investigate if someone experimented on a given feature in the past, you shouldn’t expect people to proactively go through learnings when designing experiments and features.

It’s simply too overwhelming to be the primary source of knowledge for the team.

A better approach to knowledge-sharing

You might be thinking If the standard knowledge repositories don’t work, what’s an alternative for knowledge sharing?

I firmly believe a healthy knowledge-sharing culture consists of two parts:

1. Continuous knowledge actualization
2. Current beliefs document

Let’s dig in.

Continuous knowledge actualization

First, you must ensure that everyone in the company has access to the newest discoveries and learnings available.

These must be:

• In real-time
• Easily shareable
• In a digestible format

This constant actualization of product knowledge will not only help you by providing fresh insights, but will also serve as a foundation for creating a “current beliefs document.”

Interview snapshots

User interviews should be one of your primary sources of knowledge about your users and an interview snapshot is a handy tool that helps you summarize and organize your interviews into an easily shareable format:

My interview snapshots usually consist of:

• User name for a quick reference (can be an anonymized ID)
• Photo to build empathy
• Quick facts to frame the contexts
• Key lessons learned (insights) from the interview
• New opportunities based on the interview
• Memorable quote is worth remembering

I’d recommend creating a chat channel or email thread where everyone shares those snapshots (or other types of summaries) whenever available to propagate the knowledge captured during the interview with the whole organization.

Experiment summaries

Like interview snapshots, you should distribute learnings from your experiments as soon as possible. My preferred format for experiment summaries looks like the following:

Name:

Date:

One-sentence summary:

Key learnings:

Tested hypothesis:

Hypothesis results:

Test configuration:

Detailed results:

The main part of the summary consists of name, date, one-sentence summary, and key learnings. This quick and digestible format will encourage an increasingly busy audience to read the summary.

For people wanting to dig deeper, I’d recommend writing down what hypothesis was tested, whether it was validated, what the test configuration was, and detailed results, such as the measured impact on monitored metrics.

Similarly to interview snapshots, use a dedicated channel for propagating and tracking these.

Mandatory knowledge-sharing meetings

Now, although experiment summaries and interview snapshots create an excellent summary for captured insights, they still experience the same problem knowledge repositories do — they’re often ignored, as people are already busy with their daily responsibilities.

Having dedicated communication channels and updating the whole audience on the go (rather than just generating new files in some folder) does help, but that’s not enough.

What seems to work pretty well, though, are dedicated knowledge-sharing meetings, during which:

• Each team goes through interview snapshots and experiment summaries they generated since the last meeting
• Any additional learnings and insights are shared
• There’s some room for follow-up discussion and debate

That’ll help ensure that everyone receives a fresher dose of knowledge, but will also help to solidify learnings in people’s minds.

Current beliefs document

Capturing and distributing learnings on the go with interview snapshots and experiment summaries and then reinforcing this knowledge in regular knowledge-sharing meetings is a great way to ensure everyone is up-to-date with the latest discoveries.

However, the knowledge generated in this way often lacks structure. It might be difficult to establish big-picture thinking when bombarded with various atomic insights and learnings.

This is why you also need a tangible, living artifact that’ll serve as a summary of everything we know and believe. Let’s call it a “current beliefs document:”

You create it for every important persona/user segment/sub-product you have, and as the name suggests, you write down your current beliefs regarding that group. The goal is to write around ten of your most important beliefs/insights, which will serve as your guiding principles for further research and product development.

To make it more tangible, here are two examples of different beliefs for two different user personas:

1. “For our students, the most important factor is the confidence that the answer we provide is correct, and they gain this confidence by cross-checking with one or two different sources.”
2. “Most of the teachers have a negative attitude towards our product as they believe students use it to cheat, not to learn; thus, they are unwilling to recommend it to students and frown upon students that use our product.”

For each belief, you should attach:

• Interview snapshots
• Experiment results
• Other research evidence
• Anecdotal evidence

I prefer to call them “beliefs” rather than “facts” or “insights,” as the latter tends to give a false sense of certainty and confidence, whereas the former is more inviting to challenging and further validating the beliefs.

Whenever you share a new learning with an organization, double-check it with your current beliefs. Does it provide additional evidence of what you currently believe in? Or maybe it contradicts some of your beliefs, requiring you to update the document?

Benefits of current beliefs document

The current beliefs document is an incredibly potent tool. Some of its benefits include:

• Easily onboarding new hires
• Pre-validating product ideas
• Guiding further research

Easily onboarding new hires

Instead of throwing hundreds of snapshots and summaries that no one will ever read, you can just describe your current beliefs about your users with a brief summary of the reasoning behind them to get new hires up to speed.

Pre-validating product ideas

Whenever there’s a new idea for product development, you can quickly check it against your current beliefs and see whether it aligns with them or goes against them. It’s a great filter tool.

Guiding further research

By reviewing your current beliefs and their evidence, you can easily spot which areas are heavily researched and experiment-backed, making it pointless to invest in further research there. They also help you spot those beliefs that don’t have solid evidence behind them and need further research to validate or invalidate them. It helps you keep your research effort focused and organized.

Wrap up

Way too many organizations treat knowledge sharing as a form of nice-to-have or should-have activities. However, a poor knowledge-sharing culture leads to misalignment, wasted efforts, and suboptimal product solutions.

On the other hand, although a robust knowledge-sharing culture requires effort, it helps organizations double down on captured learnings and ensures these lead to actual outcomes, not only extensive research reports.

Start with developing a cohesive way to capture and summarize learnings across the organization (such as interview snapshots and experiment summaries). Then, build a culture of creating and sharing those artifacts on a day-to-day basis. Top it up with regular insight reviews, ensuring everyone understands the current state of your knowledge of your users and product.

Featured image source: IconScout