Attrition didn’t sink us because people left. It sank us because their know-how left with them.
Until we found a way to make knowledge stay, even when people didn’t.
Rohan had promised his daughter a Saturday at the city museum. He needed the break. The last quarter had been rough. After onboarding the supplier team members, attrition hit and everything he had patiently built felt wasted. Replacement knowledge transfer happened, but it was rushed, transactional, “do this, do that,” with no why. He kept thinking: we solved this once, so why are we solving it again?
In the ancient history gallery, they paused at a display of clay tablets. A small card read: “Creators unknown. Knowledge preserved by careful recording and cataloguing.” His daughter tugged his sleeve to move on, but his mind stayed there. “Funny,” he said aloud, “the people who made these are long gone, and their know-how is still here.” “Because someone captured it,” a voice replied.
It was Mira, the Product Manager, there with her nephew. They laughed at the coincidence and walked together. A curator overheard them and added, “Every artifact arrives with missing context. We record audio notes, photograph, tag, and link each piece. Without that, the story dies.” “In projects,” Mira said, “our story dies when people leave.” “That is exactly what happened last month,” Rohan sighed. “Replacement knowledge transfer was a checklist. No context. No rationale.”
They stopped near the fossil wall. Rohan’s brain clicked. The tablets had survived centuries because the museum did three things well: capture, summarize, curate. He realized they had been fixing the wrong thing. The root cause was not poor handover. The root cause was that they only captured knowledge at the end, when someone resigned, so everything became a hurried dump. What they needed was a habit, not a rescue. “Not a handover,” he said slowly. “A museum for our product.”
On Monday, they changed the rhythm of work, not the workload. Every important discussion, design debates, demos, retrospectives, was recorded as it happened. No special ceremony. Just hit record. Within 24 hours, a tool turned each recording into a draft document. An LLM skimmed it and produced a one-pager: the problem, the decision, the rationale. It also produced a short FAQ, “what changed, what stays,” and nudged the glossary when a new term or API appeared.
They did not create new meetings; they just changed how existing ones ended. Before leaving the room or call, someone tagged the note with the module, sprint, persona, and risk. Access rules were clear, and sensitive bits were redacted before transcription. And then came the part most teams skip, the curator. A small Knowledge Management team took a pass every six months, pruning duplicates, linking related decisions, and marking each one with a simple verdict: keep, revisit, or retire. New joiners got a two-hour “museum tour” of their module on day one. “Will this really help when people quit?” a Tech Lead asked. “It helps because we stop depending on people’s memory,” Mira said. “We depend on the system. That’s the point.”
The test came sooner than they wanted. Suman, a senior engineer, put in her notice. The old panic tried to return. Rohan opened the module shelf, there were recorded knowledge transfers, design walks, and a “why we changed the cache layer” note.
“Backfill can start Tuesday,” Mira said on the call.
“Great,” Rohan replied. “Send her the tour link. Day one is a museum walk.” By Friday, the new engineer was shipping small fixes. By the next week, she took on a full story. No one had to chase five people to reconstruct the past. The roadmap stayed steady; customers did not feel the bump. In fact, one customer remarked, “It does not even feel like you had a change in the team. The new folks are already up to speed.”
Over coffee, Mira asked, “Why did this click when our earlier knowledge transfers didn’t?” “Because we moved the moment of capture,” Rohan said. “We grabbed knowledge when it was fresh, not when it was fleeing. The LLM made it readable. The Knowledge Management cadence kept it alive. We stopped treating KT like a fire drill and started treating it like hygiene.”
A month later, Rohan returned to the museum with his daughter. She ran to the clay tablets. He read the tiny card again, creators unknown, knowledge preserved by careful recording and cataloguing, and felt oddly proud. Their product finally had its own museum, not a pretty archive that no one opened, but a living exhibit that created a wealth of domain, process, and project knowledge. Every time someone left, the knowledge stayed. And with each transition, they quietly saved 5 percent of effort for the next time.
5%
Don’t let attrition erase your hard work. Reach out at info@wonderbiz.in to explore how proactive knowledge capture can protect your roadmap.
Key Takeaway
Collecting knowledge at regular intervals made attrition less painful,
handovers became smoother, and sharing was effortless.
