Tribal Knowledge
What it is
Tribal knowledge is the undocumented understanding of how things actually work, like which customer has a custom setup or why a setting behaves oddly, held by a few long-tenured people.
Why it matters
It's the reason certain engineers get every escalation, and the reason things slow down when they're on vacation or leave.
Best practices
- Capture it from resolved tickets – The answers are already written in old threads.
- Ask experts to narrate – Record walkthroughs of tricky areas.
- Reduce the need for it – Systems that can read code and config need less tribal memory.
How Decimal helps
Decimal learns from resolved tickets and reads the code directly, so knowledge that used to live with one engineer is available on every ticket.