Your team asks you the same thing four times a year.
How we do reviews. Why we decided that. What I expect from a staff engineer. Write it down once and let people ask the page instead of waiting for your one to one.
- The same questions arrive from every new joiner, every candidate, and every skip level.
- Written down once, they answer themselves, and you stop being the bottleneck on your own context.
- The views you would say out loud to your team are not the ones you want a stranger quoting, and here those are two different audiences.
What leaders use it for
- Your standards, answerable
- What a good design document looks like here. When to write a test and when not to bother. What you mean by done. Newcomers ask the page at midnight in their own words instead of searching a wiki for a phrase they do not know yet.
- Decisions that keep getting relitigated
- Why we are on this database. Why we stopped doing that. Write the reasoning once, with the date, and when you change your mind the new version takes over while the old one stays behind it. That history is the thing a wiki destroys with every edit.
- What you are like to work for
- Candidates are already asking assistants what it is like to work for you. Right now the answer is assembled from whatever the internet has. This makes it yours, in your words, with what it rests on.
- Your bar, stated once
- What you expect at each level and what actually gets somebody promoted. Say it to the whole team at once rather than eleven times in eleven one to ones.
The part to be careful with
Plenty of what you think about your own organisation is true and would be corrosive coming out of a page a stranger can read. That is what the levels are for, and why nothing is released unless you set it.
A workable split: your craft and your standards go to anyone on the web, because they are also how you hire. Your views on hiring, compensation philosophy and anything about a named person either stay at Hidden or go nowhere near the product. Anything about somebody's pay is refused outright here, which removes the worst version of this mistake.
If your company wants one too
A company can have its own page, proved by a record on its domain, with members whose own pages answer for it in their own words through their own settings. Nobody's personal page gets absorbed, and nobody has to hand over their writing to get it.
Company accounts are free today and are the part that will eventually be paid for.
Write your three standards and send the link to your team.