A few years ago, a tech startup called me in a panic: “We have the best software solution, but our teams are spending hours searching for the most basic information in the docs.”
When I arrived, I found the usual: shared folders in disorder, duplicate versions, manuals without dates, and a couple of developers who were the company’s “living encyclopedia.”
That day confirmed something I had seen many times before: technical documentation holds the most valuable knowledge in an organization. The problem wasn’t the information itself, but how it was managed.
From forgotten documents to strategic knowledge
I have worked with companies that treated documentation as a mere formality and others that turned it into a real asset. I remember an energy sector multinational: they went from outdated PDFs to a live knowledge base (KB) in Confluence, integrated with their dev stack.
Within months, they noticed productivity increased, operational errors decreased, and onboarding workflows for new employees were cut in half.
When knowledge management in technical documentation is implemented methodically, docs stop being dead files and start driving daily decisions and operations, reducing technical debt across the organization.
Tools that made a difference
In various projects, I tried many solutions. There is no magic tool, but certain choices facilitate change and adoption in tech teams:
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Notion — ideal for startups due to its flexibility and speed of adoption in SaaS environments.
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Confluence — excellent for collaborative wikis in medium and large engineering teams.
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GitHub / GitLab — essential when documentation must be versioned alongside code in the repository.
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SharePoint — useful in corporations needing standardized workflows, permissions, and audit trails.
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Document360 — designed for robust, enterprise-level technical documentation portals.
The key has always been to align the tool with the company culture and establish processes that prevent documentation from falling back into neglect.
Cases that left a mark
Some practical examples I often share in workshops:
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A telecom company reduced support tickets by 30% by migrating its technical docs to a centralized and accessible KB.
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A startup I worked with scaled from 10 to 100 employees in less than a year without losing critical knowledge, thanks to Notion and simple, repeatable update processes.
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Global leaders: Microsoft opened much of its documentation on GitHub and now benefits from external contributions; Google continuously updates internal repositories as part of its DevOps culture.
These cases are not just numbers: they reflect cultural transformation. Where there was uncertainty, trust and velocity emerged.
The most important lesson
Every time I treated technical documentation as strategic knowledge, the results were tangible: faster innovation, fewer errors, agile onboarding, and better-served clients.
But above all, teams were freed from the burden of searching for information and gained time to create value. Knowledge management in technical documentation is not an administrative task: it is an investment in the organization’s ability to learn, adapt, and scale efficiently.
Conclusion
What these projects taught me is that technical documentation was never “just documentation.” It is raw knowledge waiting to be structured.
When companies understand this and implement proper management, information stops being a problem and becomes a competitive advantage.
In technology, the winner is not the one who accumulates the most information, but the one who knows how to manage what they know. In this link, I share clients, testimonials, and experiences in the technology and software industry: https://bellykm.com/en/knowledge-management-in-technology-and-software/
Finally, there are experiences, tools, and resources I had to leave out due to length, but if you want to dive deeper, you can reach out to me at [email protected] or contact me via social media here.
