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Discussion on: How does your team share knowledge?

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Justin Lam

There are several layers of knowledge sharing.

  • Are you sharing some generic knowledge that is just cool to learn?
  • Are you sharing some relevant domain knowledge related to your product?
  • Are you sharing specific minute technical details? etc...

Each type may require a different style of education.

In your specific example, "It would be kind of a shame when one teammate tries to roll their own timezone library while another knows a great npm package that takes care of the same", the best way to deal with that is for the teammate to actually talk to his coworkers. As much as people nowadays want to absorb knowledge passively, there is some responsibility on the author to make sure they are not duplicating work.

As an example, on my previous team an engineer and product manager didn't bothered to ask anyone if a calendar component was already implemented in a sister team and instead took 3 months to build their own. All that person needed to do was to send an email or just simply talk to his teammates if there was something already available. So one way of knowledge sharing is simply to ask for that knowledge.

To the answer the question generally, there's no one right way, but I've seen the following:

  • Wiki
  • OneNote
  • MD files
  • Lunch and Learns
  • Presentations
  • Email newsletters
  • Internal Stack Overflow
  • Mailing lists