Our SaaS is 16 years old now. In the early days it was all about product market fit, generating cash, basic survival. We were too busy focusing on the latter to worry about things like documentation systems at scale.
But there was definitely a threshold that we crossed where we knew things would likely work out - at this point we started paying attention to systems at scale.
And boy am I glad we did that! Had we not taken that crucial step, we’d be suffering today.
Point is, one can’t afford to skip over these things in the early days. But it’s a tricky balance, because doing it too early is also counter productive.
I agree with you, but don't think the issue is one of documentation. Rather, it is an issue of communication.
To borrow a concept from Starcraft, what has worked well in my experience is for every member of a team/company to clearly understand their "macro loop". This involves being aware of the set of chat channels, email threads, code repositories, and documents that are most relevant to their work in the near term and in the medium term. Everyone on the team should be:
1. Checking these sources at a regular rate (once a day, once a week, once every two weeks).
2. Reflecting their work in these sources to the extent that it's relevant to their team mates.
Macro loops cannot be forced onto someone, but they can be reinforced by the rest of the team. For example, if you lead a weekly meeting and always have the meeting doc up on a shared screen, people will naturally start refer to it themselves when they need the context it contains. Or if a particular document is always linked in answers to a certain question, it will make its way onto indexes and bookmarks.
The particular systems you use to represent these things -- Slack vs. Discord vs. IRC vs. Google Hangouts for chat, GMail vs. custom servers for email, GitHub vs. GitLab vs. Bitbucket vs. self-hosted git for code, Docs vs. Quip vs. Dropbox Paper vs. Office 365 vs. Notion for docs -- really don't have a significant effect on how well a team runs its macro loops.
Our SaaS is 16 years old now. In the early days it was all about product market fit, generating cash, basic survival. We were too busy focusing on the latter to worry about things like documentation systems at scale.
But there was definitely a threshold that we crossed where we knew things would likely work out - at this point we started paying attention to systems at scale.
And boy am I glad we did that! Had we not taken that crucial step, we’d be suffering today.
Point is, one can’t afford to skip over these things in the early days. But it’s a tricky balance, because doing it too early is also counter productive.