Ask HN: Maintaining useful business documentation | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Maintaining useful business documentation

8 pointssdrinf2 comments

This question goes for lean business development folks, and patio11 : what is your method for maintaining business documentation?

Target of that product is myself, 2 months down the line; there is this landing page I put together while mentally holding a thousand insights in my head. I'm about to do multivariant testing, but will not recall what my assumptions were during the creation of the page. And I will learn new things, but later on will not recall, due to me having a very short-term memory.

Or there is this crazy idea I have, that has no relevance to the business as it stands right now; but I know for a fact that 3 months down the road will become very important.

So I guess this question has two parts: What to document? And: how to document to maximize recall?

Any helpful pointers would be appreciated

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At my day job, we put everything permanent in a wiki and everything temporary in Trac (our issue tracking software). It turns out that engineers spent most of their time in trac rather than the Wiki, so that gradually is becoming the authoritative option.

For my business, I have three things: I have a succession of paper notebooks for any idea that can get garbage collected in less than a week. This is good for, e.g., A/B tests. (Why am I doing an A/B test with the Dropbox style invites? Flips open notebook to last page. Oh, that's why.)

You're going to laugh at me for this, but for long-term, searchable business documentation... I use my blog. What the effity was I thinking when I launched this feature two years ago? Search for my blog post about it. (Issues too minor for the blog have commit notes in subversion.)

If I were more worried about exposing my ideas to the world, I'd use an internal wiki-style software instead of the blog.

The third thing, which is perhaps less useful as an answer but still true, is that I have very, very good memory for the written word. (This is one reason I write so darn much. Anything I write and almost everything I read, I get to keep.)

When I'm doing work on my own projects, I prefer to work with a sharpie marker and blank paper. It's the easiest way to get my ideas out as quickly as possible. The downside is that it's not digitized or searchable. Usually when I'm done writing and sketching out a lot of ideas, I'll just put those papers into a manila folder with a descriptive label and file it away. I bought a nice filing cabinet and label maker last year when I started doing GTD, so it works pretty well. Every meaningful thought is documented, and it's pretty easy to find it when I need it.

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