The Dangers of Tribal Knowledge
summary
Tribal knowledge creates bottlenecks and real liabilities, so document the actual fixes: keep a tiny crash course (Heroku uses three onboarding articles called Heroku Academy), and one searchable knowledge base maintained by engineers with write access. Log concrete debugging tools (Splunk, CLI, internal support KB), note specific incidents like H12 timeouts caused by Unicorn behavior, add expiration dates (Heroku flags articles after three months) and measure results — thousands of KB articles and fewer engineering interruptions.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Intro
- 7:03What is tribal knowledge
- 9:03The dangers of tribal knowledge
- 10:55Setting boundaries
- 13:07Crash course and knowledge base
- 14:44Technical terms
- 16:20Truncate
- 17:36Crash Course
- 18:19Knowledge Base
- 19:04Ease of Use
- 19:59Easy to Update
- 21:50Real Life Example
- 28:07How to keep docs up to date
- 29:52How to improve docs
- 31:22Be specific
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