Every team has one of these graveyards. A Notion workspace with 400 pages, half of them empty templates, the other half last edited in 2024. A Google Drive folder labeled "Important Docs" that contains six versions of the same onboarding guide. A Confluence instance that even the person who set it up avoids.
Building a knowledge base is easy. Building one that people actually use? That's a different problem entirely.
The failure rate is staggering. Most internal wikis become ghost towns within 90 days of launch. Not because the idea is bad -- centralized team knowledge is genuinely valuable -- but because the execution almost always breaks down in the same predictable ways.
Here's how to avoid those traps and build something that lasts.
Why most knowledge bases fail
Before jumping into the how-to, it's worth understanding why the graveyard exists. Three patterns show up over and over:
Too much structure upfront. Someone spends two weeks building an elaborate hierarchy of folders, tags, and templates before a single piece of real content exists. The structure doesn't match how people actually think, so nobody knows where to put things. The beautiful architecture becomes a barrier instead of a guide.
No clear ownership. Everyone is responsible for "keeping it updated," which means nobody is. Docs go stale. New hires find outdated processes. Someone follows a three-month-old guide and breaks something in production.
Search doesn't work. This is the killer. If someone can't find what they need in under 30 seconds, they'll ask on Slack instead. Once "just ask in the channel" becomes the default, the knowledge base is dead. It doesn't matter how much good content is in there.
Step 1: Start with what people actually ask
Forget building a comprehensive wiki. Start by answering the questions your team already asks repeatedly.
Open your Slack or chat history. Search for phrases like "where do I find," "how do I," "does anyone know," and "what's the process for." Those recurring questions are your first batch of knowledge base articles.
Common categories that show up on almost every team:
- Onboarding basics: How to set up your dev environment, how to request access, where to find brand assets (this category alone can dramatically speed up employee onboarding)
- Processes: How to submit expenses, how to request PTO, how deployments work
- Decisions and context: Why we chose this tech stack, what the pricing model is, what we decided about that feature in the Q3 planning meeting
- Tribal knowledge: The stuff that lives in one person's head and causes a crisis when they go on vacation
Start with 10-15 articles that cover the most frequently asked questions. That's it. You can expand later. Getting a small, high-quality, actually-useful base is worth more than a sprawling wiki that covers everything poorly.
Step 2: Make search the primary interface
This is the most important decision you'll make, and most teams get it wrong.
People don't browse knowledge bases. They search them. If your system requires someone to know which folder a document lives in, you've already lost. The primary way people should interact with your knowledge base is a search bar that returns relevant results fast.
What "good search" means:
- Full-text search that looks inside documents, not just titles
- Fuzzy matching so typos and different phrasing still find the right doc
- Recency weighting so outdated content doesn't outrank current information
- AI-powered search that lets people ask questions in plain language instead of guessing keywords
Tools like Notion, Slite, and Guru have decent built-in search. A searchable company wiki like Trilo takes it further by letting you ask natural language questions against your entire workspace -- docs, conversations, and task history -- so the AI can synthesize an answer from multiple sources rather than just returning a list of documents.
If your current tool's search is weak, that alone might be a reason to switch. A knowledge base with bad search is just a filing cabinet nobody opens.
Step 3: Assign ownership, not authorship
Here's the distinction that saves knowledge bases from dying: every document needs an owner, not just an author.
The author writes the initial version. The owner is responsible for keeping it accurate. These can be the same person, but the ownership role is what matters long-term.
A practical ownership model:
- Each article has a designated owner (usually the person closest to that topic)
- Owners get a quarterly ping: "Is this still accurate? Review and update or mark as archived."
- When someone changes a process, they're responsible for updating the corresponding doc (or notifying the owner)
- Stale content gets flagged visually -- add a "last reviewed" date at the top of each article
Some teams go further and add a "confidence" label: "verified current," "probably current," "needs review." This is surprisingly effective. People trust docs labeled "verified this month" and know to double-check ones marked "needs review."
Step 4: Build capture into existing workflows
The biggest reason knowledge bases go stale is that updating them feels like extra work. And it is extra work, unless you build capture into the workflows people already follow.
Practical ways to do this:
- After every decision meeting, someone drops a one-paragraph summary into the knowledge base. Not detailed minutes -- just the decision, the reasoning, and who was involved.
- When someone answers a question on Slack, copy the answer into the knowledge base and reply with a link. Next time, people find the doc instead of asking again.
- During onboarding, new hires flag anything that's missing or wrong. They're the best auditors because they're actually trying to follow the docs.
- When a process changes, the person making the change updates the doc as part of the rollout checklist. Not after. During.
The pattern is the same: make documentation a side effect of work that's already happening, not a separate task on someone's to-do list.
Step 5: Keep the structure flat and flexible
Remember the elaborate folder hierarchies that kill most wikis? Here's the alternative: keep things flat and use tags or links instead of deep nesting.
A two-level structure works for most teams:
Team Knowledge Base
|-- Engineering
|-- Product
|-- Design
|-- Operations
|-- Company-wide
That's it. Five top-level categories. Everything goes in one of them. If an article could go in two places, pick one and add a cross-reference link.
Within each category, don't create sub-folders. Use tags for filtering (like "onboarding," "process," "reference," "decision log") and rely on search for everything else.
The urge to create more structure will be strong. Resist it. Every layer of hierarchy is a decision point that slows people down. Flat structures with good search beat deep folder trees every time.
Step 6: Make it part of the culture
The final piece is cultural, and it's the hardest to get right.
Knowledge base adoption sticks when the team believes in it. That belief comes from three things:
Leadership uses it. When a manager answers a question by linking to a knowledge base article instead of re-explaining, that sends a signal. When leadership references docs in meetings, people notice.
New content gets celebrated. Give a shout-out when someone writes a great article. It sounds small, but public acknowledgment turns documentation from a chore into a contribution.
It saves people time. This is the real flywheel. Once people experience the moment of finding an answer in the knowledge base in 10 seconds instead of waiting 2 hours for a Slack reply, they're hooked. That experience has to happen early and often.
Recommended tools
Your choice of tool matters less than your execution, but some options worth evaluating:
- Notion: Great for teams that want flexibility. Solid search, good templates, and it handles docs well. Can get messy at scale without discipline.
- Slite: Purpose-built for team knowledge bases with built-in verification workflows and good AI search.
- Guru: Designed for knowledge management with browser extension, Slack integration, and content verification.
- Trilo: A team knowledge base that combines docs with tasks and chat in one workspace, so AI can pull context from across everything your team does when answering questions.
- GitBook: Great for technical documentation. Less suited for general team knowledge.
Pick one. Commit to it for at least six months. Tool-hopping is the fastest way to kill momentum.
The 30-day quick start
Week 1: Identify your top 15 most-asked questions from chat history. Write the first 5 articles.
Week 2: Write the remaining 10. Set up ownership and review dates. Share with the team.
Week 3-4: Track usage. Note which articles get visited, which questions still come up on Slack that should be in the knowledge base. Fill gaps.
After 30 days, you'll have a functional knowledge base that covers the basics, a team that's starting to use it, and data on what to build next. That's a better foundation than any amount of upfront architecture planning.
The best knowledge base is one your team searches before they ask on Slack. Trilo lets anyone on your team ask plain-English questions against your docs, tasks, and conversation history. Build a knowledge base people actually use.
