Building an evergreen knowledge base

When I joined Pictarine, the team was about 20 people. Now, we are 80 people and counting.

What once lived in a few minds, shared in real time, got buried in Slack threads, out-of-date docs, and exotic team folders.

This hit especially hard in the Marketing department. Our team was growing fast, and we were starting to trip over the same missing pieces of context: past experiments, competitive insights, campaign rationales. New hires came in and asked smart questions, but they lacked a shared base to stand on. They couldn’t see the full picture: what we’d already tried, what mattered most, where the market was heading.

Well, scaling brings all kinds of challenges.

So I rebuilt our Marketing Department’s internal knowledge base from scratch.

I learned that context is everything, no matter how many years of experience someone has. The stronger your understanding of company knowledge, the sharper your intuition. Your decision-making improves.

Slack is where knowledge goes to die. Notion is where it can be (re)built, but only if you treat it like product design, not documentation.

And it worked:

• New hires got up to speed faster.
• We stopped answering the same questions every week.
• Teams operated with sharper alignment because the context wasn’t locked in someone's head anymore.

How to build it

• Design matters: structure and aesthetics shape engagement. Make your knowledge base visually appealing so people want to use it.
• Keep it simple: complexity kills adoption. When databases flourish everywhere, clarity dies. Assign ownership to people with strong document design skills.
• Tailor views to your audience: an update on the roadmap for a C-level should look very different than one for an individual contributor. Design views accordingly.
• Set knowledge performance principles: example: each team member is 100% responsible of maintaining and updating the company knowledge.
• Centralise strategic information: competitor analysis, industry trends, internal playbooks: this is your collective brain. Keep it in one place, easily accessible.
• Champion adoption: showcase your workspace. Empower your Notion power users to drive usage and education.

Top-level structure

• Marketing Homepage
  • Department overview
    • Access to Teams sub-pages
    • Department Guidelines
  • What we’re working on
    • Hot topics with status and owners

Main blocks (grid layout)

Team docs
→ Onboarding, rituals, brand, reporting

Team meetings
→ Weekly, rituals, 1:1s, leadership forums

Team resources
→ Strategy, market research, business reviews, creative assets

Market research
→ Seasonal peaks, trends, key occasions

Hiring tracker
→ Candidates, roles, interview stages

If no one owns your company’s knowledge base, it is already fractured. You just haven’t felt it yet.

This wasn’t some top-down, company-wide overhaul and it shouldn’t have been. It started as a personal initiative. I knew that if I wanted to drive real change, I had to start "small" and prove the impact. So I focused on rebuilding the Marketing department’s knowledge base first.

You can’t ask the company to adopt a better system until you’ve shown that it works. Fix it at the team level. Build something that actually gets used. Then you can make the case for scaling it further with results, not just good intentions.