The other day I updated my LinkedIn profile. Many people congratulated me on my promotion to CTO. The most interesting one was from someone who ended up doing the job I last had before I left Amazon. I decided to reach out and see if he wanted to have a coffee. I was curious how things were going.
I used to manage the software dev teams responsible for sortation systems across all of Amazon’s warehouses. This problem space was operationally intense, the software had to be highly available and robust. If these systems went down or misrouted packages, they affected a fulfillment center’s ability to meet throughput SLAs. In operations, this is a big deal.
I wasn’t sure what to really expect. Turns out he’s a super nice guy; he recently left the role for another within Amazon Fulfillment. I was surprised, the first thing he did was thank me. He thanked me for all the wikis and blogs that I wrote when I was on the job. All this documentation really helped him understand the space, the evolution of the systems, how to actually do the job and the challenges he would face. This got me thinking, I should start blogging again!
It also got me thinking about how important it is for startups to document processes. At Wealthsimple we have a decent culture of documenting in Quip, but it’s not 100% universal. I recently lost my sole technical recruiter. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely familiar with the end-to-end workflow around how we used our third-party recruiting software. I noticed many different teams were using it differently, inconsistency drives me a little crazy. When I asked around if there was any documentation on the official HR process, I got blank stares. Turns out there wasn’t any!
There’s no time like the present. I sat down with one of my colleagues to use the software through the most common use-cases. Along the way, we identified any potential process bottlenecks. He then spent time with one of our recruiters to refine and document the process.
Documentation is the road you leave behind. It’s also a high-leverage task. Once written, it keeps on giving each time a new person reads it and it’s low maintenance. If the reader finds a mistake, they’ll correct it. It’s important to document so other’s don’t have to guess, rediscover or reinvent. Someday, they might even thank you.