Most teams end up with a Confluence instance that becomes cluttered, hard to navigate, and filled with outdated information. People don't know where to find things, documentation gets duplicated across spaces, and new team members spend weeks just learning where things live. The result is lost productivity and knowledge that never gets shared.

High-performing teams solve this differently. They don't just have better documentation—they have a structure and culture that makes knowledge naturally discoverable, maintainable, and trustworthy.

The Foundation: Think Purpose First, Not Teams

The biggest mistake teams make is creating a space for every team or project. Marketing space, Engineering space, Design space—and then wondering why client information is scattered across three different places and nobody trusts any of it.​

Instead, start with purpose. Ask: What problems do people need to solve, and what information do they need to solve them?​

This shifts the thinking:

• Team spaces should hold artifacts of how the team works together: meeting notes, decision logs, rituals, internal processes. Things that rarely matter to outsiders.​
• Functional spaces (like "Sales Operations," "Product Launch," "Client Onboarding") hold information that flows across teams. A sales person, solutions architect, operations lead, and engineer might all need to reference the same client or feature documentation.​
• Reference spaces are your system documentation: style guides, company policies, how-to guides, and runbooks that anyone might need.

Three High-Level Practices That Actually Stick

1. Create One Source of Truth for Cross-Team Information

When Sales documents a client, Solutions Architects shouldn't have to re-document it. When Engineering discovers something about the product, Operations shouldn't have to hunt down a Slack thread.​

The practice: For information that multiple teams touch - clients, features, systems, processes - create a shared space with a clear template. Everyone contributes to the same page, version history stays intact, and there's one place to look.​

This requires one person to own the maintenance (even if it's rotating), and a quarterly review to archive what's no longer relevant.​

2. Build in Regular Reviews, Don't Set and Forget

Knowledge goes stale fast. The runbook from six months ago isn't accurate. The onboarding checklist was updated twice but only half of it is recorded. The decision log trails off because nobody remembers to add to it.​

The practice: Assign ownership to someone (or a small rotating team), and build a quarterly or milestone-based refresh cadence. Spend 30 minutes reviewing three spaces per quarter. Archive what's dead, update what's changed, flag what needs work.​

This isn't a big project. It's small, ongoing maintenance that keeps things trustworthy.​

3. Make Documentation a Ritual, Not an Afterthought

High-performing teams don't document after the fact. They document as they go.​

The practice: Embed lightweight templates into your regular workflows. After a big decision, fill out a one-paragraph entry in your decision log. After a post-mortem, fill out the template. After a launch, add three bullet points to your playbook.​

When documentation is part of the ritual (the meeting template includes a "decision" field, the standup notes have a section for blockers), it happens. It doesn't feel like extra work—it's just how you work.​

What This Actually Looks Like in Action

Before: Teams maintain chaos. Sales has client info in their space. Engineering has it in theirs. Ops has it in theirs. New hires spend weeks onboarding and still can't find things. Old documentation hangs around and confuses people.

After: A company has a 'Clients' space that Sales, Solutions, Ops, and Engineering all contribute to. A clear template for each new client. One person reviews it quarterly. When someone joins, they can read ten pages and actually understand the lay of the land. When someone leaves, nothing is lost because it was never in their head—it was always documented.

The difference? Not more documentation. Better structure, clear ownership, and treating knowledge maintenance as an ongoing ritual rather than a one-time project.​