James Ford at StaffPlus London 2023
summary
Argues that writing reusable artifacts plus cross‑team working groups changes decisions across ~100 engineers, not meetings alone; builds a searchable docs library, templates, key decision records, TLDRs, Slack prompts and onboarding hooks that are repeatable and low cost and that persist after the author moves on; shows maintenance and audience drift are real costs but that documentation as source of truth plus working groups ownership reliably scales influence and wins alignment.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:04Documentation drives impact
- 3:12Influencing at staff level
- 6:23Qualities for influence
- 8:29Documentation solves limits
- 10:59Documentation reduces work
- 12:23Effective documentation traits
- 13:06Four documentation purposes
- 18:02Documentation challenges
- 20:47Documentation tips
- 23:13Summary
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