By now you’ve learned that documentation is a team sport and requires the help of your team’s knowledge holders. Now it’s finally time to put that to the test.

In this next lesson, we’ll focus on who to invite and how to invite them. 

For this initial round of invites, you’ll want to focus on key knowledge holders before inviting your entire company. This will help set the stage for your internal knowledge base before launching it to the entire team. Think of this as your own personal team of knowledge base MVPs. 

Create a list of knowledge holders

Begin by creating a list of key knowledge holders for each category you’ve connected. These teammates should already have a good idea of the kind of questions they receive on a daily basis about that topic. In other words, they already possess much of the knowledge the rest of your team will find useful.

Pro tip: It’s good practice to write these down on a Tettra page so everyone joining knows who is accountable for each topic. You can use our Knowledge Holder template. Just copy and paste it into your Tettra account.

Invite your knowledge holders

Once you’ve identified your Knowledge Holders, navigate to the Team Members page of your account and click “Invite Teammates”.

Then click invite teammates

For the time being, set these users roles to Editor. This will allow them to make changes to most of the account (except for Billing and other Admin-only features). We’ll cover more about each user rolein a further lesson, but rest easy knowing you can change your users’ roles at any time if necessary.

If you’ve already connected your Slack integration, go ahead and click the “Slack team members option” and select each person you’d like to invite. If you’re not using the Slack integration, you can select the “Email contacts” option and add each person by their email address. 

Once you’ve done this, click ‘Next’, select the page, template, or dashboard you’d like your invitees to see when they first sign in, and include an optional personalized message. We recommend using that “Why We’re Trying Tettra” from Lesson 1 page so that your team is all on the same page (literally).

Finally, click the ‘Send’ button and you’re ready to start collaborating!

Read more about how to invite teammates here.

Suggestions

Now that you’ve invited your first round of power users, it’s time to tell them what to document to get all that information trapped in their heads and into your knowledge base. The best way to do that is by using Suggestions.

What are Suggestions?

Suggestions is an internal ticketing system that enables your team to:

1. Assign questions that need an answer to Knowledge Holders
2. Let Readers surface when a page needs to be updated or created
3. Set reminders to check in on a page that’s subject to change
4. Mock up what pages have yet to be written (so people know they are coming) 

Think of it this way: When a teammate can’t find the information they need, what should they do next? With Suggestions, they can request a page be updated or created and assign it to the relevant Knowledge Owner.

Using Suggestions

If a question is asked but the asker just wasn’t able to find it, your knowledge holder can quickly attach the relevant Tettra page and close out the ticket. 

If the documentation needs to be updated or doesn’t yet exist, your knowledge holders can write/update the page, then answer the Suggestion with said page. 

Finally, Tettra’s friendly bot will periodically remind the person assigned a Suggestion to answer it. That way, you don’t have to hassle people to actually write stuff down.

Putting it all together

Basically, you can think of Tettra as a looped workflow that helps you organically capture answers to questions over time and keep them updated. 

Here’s how it works:

1. An answer to a question exists and is up to date. It can immediately be used and the Page Owner is thanked.
2. An answer to a question exists, but is out of date. A request for an update is made, the page gets updated, the asker uses the knowledge, and say thank you to the Page Owner.
3. An answer to a question doesn’t exist. A Knowledge owner is assign, they answer the question, the asker is alerted, they use it, and say thank you.

In each case, this knowledge loop helps your documentation grow organically, reduces the risk of pages becoming stale, and helps your users by giving them a streamlined order of operations when they can’t find what they need.

Now that you’ve seen how every feature works together, you can use Suggestions to start delegating tasks to your knowledge holders. 

Pro tip: If you or your team is stumped on what to answer, then try searching Slack for a “?” to see what was asked.

This can be as broad as “Document the answer to a question you’re asked on a regular basis” or as specific as assigning “How do we close down the office at the end of the day” to your People Ops knowledge holder. 

This will help your knowledge holders get in the mindset of using the Suggestions flow and also help share the load of populating your knowledge base.