How to Create Operations Documentation for Growing Companies

I'll never forget the moment I realized our growth was killing us.

We'd just hired our 15th person at Simpo. Revenue was up 300% year-over-year. We were landing bigger clients. Everything looked amazing from the outside.

And on the inside? Complete chaos.

New hires were taking six weeks to get productive. We'd explain the same processes to different people and somehow end up with five different versions of "how we do things." Critical knowledge lived exclusively in the heads of our earliest employees—and they were all starting to look exhausted.

I remember one particularly brutal day when three different people asked me the same question about our customer onboarding process within two hours. Questions I'd already answered. Multiple times. To different people.

That's when it hit me: we were growing faster than we could transfer knowledge.

And here's the kicker—I knew we needed documentation. I'd known for months. But between hiring, fundraising, building product, and managing customers, documentation kept getting pushed to "next week."

Sound familiar?

I'm Yuval, founder and CEO of Glitter AI. After learning these lessons the hard way at Simpo and now building a company specifically to make documentation easier, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the unique challenges of documenting operations while you're growing. Let me share what actually works.

Why Growing Companies Struggle with Documentation

The irony is brutal: the faster you grow, the more you need documentation. And the faster you grow, the less time you have to create it.

At Simpo, when we were just five people, we didn't really need docs. Everyone knew everything. Communication was instant. If someone had a question, you could just turn around and ask.

Then we hit about 12 people. Suddenly you couldn't keep everything in your head. But you were so busy growing that stopping to document felt like hitting the brakes right when you needed to accelerate.

By 20 people? The wheels were falling off.

The Growth Documentation Gap

Here's what I see happen at almost every growing company:

Phase 1 (1-5 people): No documentation needed. Everyone's in the same room. Processes change daily anyway.

Phase 2 (5-15 people): You know you need docs, but you're "too busy" to create them. You tell yourself you'll get to it next quarter.

Phase 3 (15-30 people): Critical mass hits. New hires are struggling. Mistakes are expensive. You're firefighting constantly. Now documentation feels overwhelming because there's so much to catch up on.

Phase 4 (30+ people): You finally force yourself to document, but it's painful. You're documenting while running at full speed, and half your docs are outdated before you finish them.

I lived through all four phases. The mistake I made was waiting until Phase 3 to start seriously documenting. Don't do what I did.

The Real Cost of Poor Documentation During Growth

Let me put some numbers on this.

When we finally tracked it at Simpo, we found that our lack of documentation was costing us about 25 hours per week in repeated explanations and mistakes. That's more than half a full-time employee just spinning wheels.

New hire productivity? It took six weeks to get someone fully ramped on our customer success processes. After we documented those processes properly, it dropped to two weeks. Four weeks of lost productivity per hire, and we were hiring every month.

Then there were the expensive mistakes. A new account manager lost us a $30,000 client because they didn't follow our escalation process—a process that existed only in our VP's head.

The worst part? Our best people were burning out from constant interruptions. They couldn't do their actual jobs because they were too busy being the living documentation.

What to Document First (The Growth-Stage Priority Matrix)

When you're growing fast, you don't have time to document everything. You need to be ruthlessly strategic about what gets documented first.

Here's the framework I wish I'd used earlier. I organize it by two factors: how frequently the process happens and how painful it is when it goes wrong.

Quadrant 1: High Frequency + High Pain = Document Immediately

These are your critical operational processes that happen all the time and cause major problems when they're done wrong.

Customer-facing processes. At Simpo, this was customer onboarding, support ticket handling, and our service delivery workflow. These directly impacted revenue and reputation. Every time someone did these wrong, we risked losing money or damaging relationships.

Start here. Document exactly how these processes work, including decision points and quality standards.

Revenue-generating activities. Your sales process, lead qualification, contract creation, invoicing—anything that brings money in the door needs to be documented and consistent.

I learned this when two different salespeople quoted wildly different prices to similar customers. Embarrassing conversation with one of them when they found out.

Access and security protocols. How you grant system access, handle sensitive data, manage credentials. Get this wrong and you're looking at security breaches or compliance nightmares.

Quadrant 2: High Frequency + Lower Pain = Document Soon

These are processes you do constantly, and while messing them up isn't catastrophic, the sheer repetition makes documentation valuable.

Common internal workflows. How you run standups, conduct reviews, approve purchases, manage PTO requests. These happen all the time, and having them documented means new people can figure it out without asking.

Routine operational tasks. Things like how to process orders, update inventory, generate reports, or manage your CRM. Not life-or-death, but documenting them saves everyone time.

At Glitter AI, I documented our content review process early. It wasn't mission-critical, but we did it weekly, and having a clear guide meant I didn't need to be in every review meeting.

Quadrant 3: Lower Frequency + High Pain = Document Before You Need It

These don't happen often, but when they do, you really don't want to be figuring them out on the fly.

Crisis management. What do you do if the servers go down? If there's a data breach? If a key person quits suddenly? If a major client threatens to leave?

I created our crisis playbooks at 2 AM during an actual crisis at Simpo. Do not recommend. Create them beforehand when you can think clearly.

Compliance and legal processes. How you handle GDPR requests, conduct audits, manage contracts, do background checks. You might only do these quarterly or annually, but the stakes are high.

Onboarding and offboarding. These happen less frequently as you scale (compared to daily operations), but getting them wrong means security risks, poor new hire experiences, or ex-employees with access they shouldn't have.

Check out my guide on how to delegate tasks effectively for more on building these kinds of critical processes.

Quadrant 4: Lower Frequency + Lower Pain = Document Later

These are nice to have but shouldn't be your priority when you're growing fast.

Rare administrative tasks. Things you do once a year, like annual planning processes or quarterly board reporting templates. Sure, document them eventually, but they can wait.

Experimental processes. If you're still figuring out how something should work and it changes every week, don't waste time documenting it. Let it stabilize first.

Personal preferences. How individual people like their coffee or prefer to format their calendars. Not documentation-worthy.

How to Build Documentation That Scales With Growth

Here's the thing about documentation for growing companies: it needs to be easy to create and easy to update, or it won't survive your growth.

I made the mistake at Simpo of creating beautiful, comprehensive documentation that took hours to write and hours to update. Three months later, half of it was outdated and nobody trusted it.

Don't build documentation that requires perfection. Build documentation that requires momentum.

Start with Screen Recordings, Not Writing

This is the biggest shift I made between Simpo and Glitter AI.

Instead of sitting down to write 10-page process documents, I just recorded myself doing the task while talking through it. "Okay, I'm logging into the dashboard. I'm clicking here because we need to check X first. Now I'm doing Y, and here's why..."

Five minutes of recording beats an hour of writing. And honestly? Most people prefer watching a quick video to reading a manual anyway.

At Glitter AI, that's literally what we built the product to do—turn those recordings into proper documentation automatically. But even if you're just using Loom or any screen recorder, this approach works.

The "Just-in-Time" Documentation Method

Don't try to document everything upfront. Document processes right when you need to delegate them.

Here's how it works: when you're about to teach someone a task for the first time, record yourself doing it instead of just verbally explaining it. Now you've got documentation for the next person who needs to learn it.

At Simpo, I spent two weeks trying to document all our processes in advance. Most of those docs sat unused because they weren't quite right or the process had already changed.

At Glitter AI, I document when I delegate. It's faster, more accurate (because I'm capturing the actual current process), and I know it'll be used immediately.

Create a Single Source of Truth

One of the biggest mistakes I see growing companies make is having documentation scattered everywhere. Some stuff is in Google Docs. Some in Notion. Some in Confluence. Some in random Slack messages.

Pick one place for your operational documentation and stick to it ruthlessly.

At Simpo, we finally consolidated everything into Notion. At Glitter AI, we use our own product (shameless plug, I know). The specific tool matters less than the commitment to a single source.

And for the love of everything good, make sure your team actually knows where to find this place. Put the link in your employee handbook, in your onboarding docs, in your Slack channel descriptions—everywhere.

Make Documentation Someone's Job

This is the hard truth: if documentation is everyone's responsibility, it's no one's responsibility.

You don't need to hire a full-time documentation specialist when you're at 20 people. But someone needs to be accountable for making sure docs exist, stay updated, and are actually being used.

At Glitter AI, I assigned this to one of our team leads as 20% of their role. Their job isn't to write all the documentation themselves—it's to make sure documentation happens, to bug people when docs go stale, and to maintain the system.

We also use a simple approach I learned from a friend: when you document your operations processes, make sure to include knowledge transfer strategies so institutional knowledge doesn't walk out the door when someone leaves.

Build Documentation Into Your Workflows

The best documentation is the kind that gets updated automatically as part of doing the work.

For example, when we update a customer-facing process at Glitter AI, the last step in that update is literally "update the documentation." Not a separate task for later. Part of the change.

When someone completes a task differently than the docs describe, we have a culture of fixing the docs right then. It takes 30 seconds to note "Hey, step 3 is actually different now" in the document, but it saves everyone else from following outdated instructions.

Small businesses often struggle with this too—if you're earlier stage, start simple and build up as you grow.

Common Documentation Mistakes During Growth (And How to Avoid Them)

I've made pretty much every documentation mistake possible. Let me save you the pain.

Mistake #1: Waiting for the "Right Time"

There is no right time. You're always going to be busy. You're always going to have competing priorities.

The best time to start documenting was six months ago. The second-best time is today.

I kept telling myself I'd start documenting at Simpo "after this fundraise" or "after we ship this feature" or "once things calm down." Things never calm down when you're growing.

Mistake #2: Over-Engineering the System

Do not spend a month evaluating documentation tools. Do not build a complex approval workflow. Do not create elaborate templates.

Just pick a tool (Notion, Google Docs, whatever), create a folder, and start dumping knowledge into it. You can organize and improve later.

Perfect documentation that doesn't exist is infinitely worse than messy documentation that does.

Mistake #3: Documenting for Today Instead of Tomorrow

Write your documentation with next month's team size in mind, not today's.

If you're 10 people planning to be 20, write docs that will make sense to someone who joins when you're 20. Include context that seems obvious now but won't be obvious to someone who wasn't there.

At Simpo, we wrote docs that referenced "the spreadsheet Sarah uses" and "that thing we decided in the Q2 planning meeting." Completely useless for anyone who joined after Sarah left or wasn't in that meeting.

Mistake #4: No Ownership or Maintenance Plan

Documentation rots fast at growing companies. Processes change. Tools change. People change.

Every piece of documentation should have an owner and a review schedule. Even if the review schedule is just "check this every quarter to make sure it's still accurate."

At Glitter AI, we tag every doc with an owner and a last-updated date. If something hasn't been updated in six months, it gets flagged for review.

Mistake #5: Making It Too Hard to Contribute

If only one person can create or update documentation, you're screwed.

Your documentation system needs to be accessible to everyone on the team. They should be able to create new docs, suggest edits, and flag outdated info without jumping through hoops.

We use a simple rule: anyone can create or edit documentation. If there's a disagreement about content, the doc owner makes the final call. But the default is open contribution.

Maintaining Documentation During Rapid Growth

Creating documentation is hard. Keeping it current during rapid growth is harder.

Here's what actually works:

Build a Documentation Culture

This sounds soft, but it's critical. Documentation needs to be a value that the leadership team demonstrates and the whole company practices.

At Glitter AI, when someone asks a question in Slack that's answered in our docs, we link to the docs instead of re-answering. Not to be jerks, but to reinforce that the docs are the source of truth.

When we onboard new hires, we explicitly teach them how to use and update our documentation on day one. It's not a side note—it's a core part of how we work.

And when I catch myself explaining something verbally that should be documented, I stop mid-explanation and say, "Actually, let me record this so everyone has it."

Create Documentation Sprint Days

Once a quarter, we do a "documentation sprint" day. The whole team spends half a day reviewing and updating docs.

It's not glamorous, but it works. We go through our most important processes, verify they're still accurate, update screenshots, and flag anything that needs to be rewritten.

Trying to keep docs updated continuously never worked for us. Scheduling dedicated time did.

Use Version Control and Change Logs

When a process changes, document when it changed and why. This helps people understand the evolution and catches cases where someone's following an old version of the process.

We keep a simple change log in each doc: "Updated 2026-12-15: Changed approval workflow to include department heads."

It takes 10 seconds and saves hours of confusion later.

Measure and Track Documentation Health

What gets measured gets managed. We track a few simple metrics:

• Documentation coverage: What % of our critical processes are documented?
• Freshness: What % of docs have been reviewed in the last 90 days?
• Usage: Which docs are accessed most? Which aren't being used at all?

These aren't perfect metrics, but they help us spot problems. If a doc hasn't been accessed in six months, maybe it's not actually useful. If our coverage is dropping, we're growing faster than we're documenting.

The approach also helps with other operational areas—our operations documentation best practices post covers this in more detail.

Signs Your Documentation Is Working

How do you know if your documentation efforts are paying off?

Here are the signs I look for at Glitter AI:

New hires ramp faster. If your time-to-productivity for new employees is dropping, your documentation is working. We went from six weeks to two weeks for customer success roles after documenting those processes properly.

Fewer repeated questions. Track how often people ask the same questions. If it's going down, people are finding answers in the docs instead.

Less reliance on specific people. Can your team function when key people are on vacation? If yes, your documentation is doing its job of distributing knowledge.

Fewer expensive mistakes. Are people following processes correctly more often? Are you seeing fewer costly errors? That's documentation working.

Documentation is being updated naturally. If people are organically updating docs as they use them, you've built the right culture and system.

At Simpo, none of these things were true until we got serious about documentation. At Glitter AI, we built the company with documentation as a core value from day one, and the difference is night and day.

Getting Started Tomorrow

Here's your action plan for this week:

Monday: Identify your three most critical operational processes—the ones that would hurt most if someone did them wrong.

Tuesday: Record yourself performing one of those processes while talking through it. Don't edit, don't make it perfect, just capture the knowledge.

Wednesday: Share that recording with someone who needs to learn the process. Get feedback on what's missing or unclear.

Thursday: Create a simple home for your documentation. A Notion page, a Google Drive folder, a wiki—whatever works. Just pick one and make it official.

Friday: Document your documentation system. Where do docs live? Who's responsible? How do you keep them updated? Write this down so it doesn't just stay in your head.

That's it. Five days, five actions. You'll have more documentation than most growing companies and a system to build on.

Growing companies can't afford to keep critical knowledge locked in people's heads. But you also can't afford to spend months building the perfect documentation system.

Start small. Start now. And build momentum.

Yuval / Founder & CEO, Glitter AI

Frequently Asked Questions

When should a growing company start documenting operations?

Start documenting the moment you find yourself explaining the same process more than twice. This typically happens around 5-10 employees, but the earlier you start, the better. Don't wait until you're overwhelmed—by then, you'll have too much to catch up on.

What operations should we document first during rapid growth?

Focus on high-frequency, high-impact processes first: customer-facing workflows, revenue-generating activities, and security protocols. These directly affect your business outcomes and happen often enough that documentation provides immediate value. Lower-priority processes can wait until you've covered the critical ones.

How do we keep documentation updated when processes change constantly?

Build documentation updates into your workflow changes—make updating docs the last step of any process change. Schedule quarterly documentation sprint days where the team reviews and updates key docs. Assign documentation owners for each critical process who are responsible for keeping content current.

How much time should we spend on documentation while growing?

Use the just-in-time approach: document processes as you delegate them, not before. A 5-minute screen recording while performing a task is often enough. Don't aim for perfect documentation—aim for good-enough documentation that actually exists and gets used.

What tools work best for operations documentation in growing companies?

The best tool is the one your team will actually use. Notion, Google Docs, Confluence, or dedicated tools like Glitter AI all work—what matters is having a single source of truth that's easy to access and update. Don't spend weeks evaluating tools; pick one and start documenting.

How do we get our team to actually use the documentation we create?

Make documentation part of your culture from the top down. When someone asks a question answered in docs, link to the docs. Train new hires on how to find and update documentation on day one. Make docs easy to search and contribute to. Most importantly, keep documentation accurate so people trust it.

Should we hire a dedicated person for documentation?

Not necessarily at first. Around 20-30 people, assign documentation ownership to someone as 20% of their role. Their job is ensuring docs exist and stay updated, not writing everything themselves. A full-time documentation role usually makes sense around 50+ people, depending on your complexity.

What's the biggest mistake growing companies make with documentation?

Waiting too long to start. Most companies know they need documentation but keep pushing it to "next quarter" because they're busy growing. By the time they start, they're overwhelmed with how much they need to catch up on. Start small and early, even if it's imperfect.