What I Still Document at a Lean Agency

Documentation might be holding your agency back. I say that as someone who used to be THE documentation guy.

I held an ops role at an agency where internal learning, knowledge management, and SOPs were the core of the job. I found documentation, assembled it, updated it, and built the system for the team to work with it. I even wrote a 2,500-word tome on what an agency culture of documentation looks like. Documentation was king, and I’ve always held it in the highest regard.

What I’ve come to realize is that documentation is only as good as the system that keeps it front and center and up to date. In most $3-5M agencies running lean, highly billable teams with a flat hierarchy, keeping it up to date isn’t the highest priority.

The upkeep is where lean agencies fall down

Think about who would keep it current. In a lean agency almost everyone is billable, and the hours that aren’t billable already go to sales, hiring, and whatever broke this week. There usually isn’t a layer of management whose job is to own the process library, so the docs get written once and then nobody touches them.

Meanwhile the work keeps moving. A 3,000-word SOP on your entire content production process isn’t going to last with the way technology is disrupting the space. The workflow it describes changes every few months, and the document doesn’t change with it.

That’s how documentation ends up out of date, incorrect, and not helpful for the goal at hand. A new hire who follows an outdated SOP does the old version of the job, and does it confidently, because the document told them to.

Minimum viable documentation gets touched every week

So these days I take a minimum viable approach. The documentation worth keeping is useful in a weekly setting. It gets touched every week, it covers workflows that happen often, and it’s lean enough to keep up to date.

Use is what keeps it current. A doc that somebody opens every Tuesday gets fixed the first time it’s wrong, because the person reading it notices. A doc that gets opened twice a year can be wrong for months before anyone finds out.

By that test, there are four places where documentation earns the upkeep.

The four places I still document

Points of view that help the account team represent the work. One I like covers the types of content your team creates, which categories and formats you excel in, why, and what each one is for. It’s relatively evergreen and it gets used all the time. It backs up your account managers at the moments when value perception is on the line, like when a client asks why they’re paying for one long guide instead of four blog posts.

Delivery processes that cross people and departments. When a deliverable passes hands from strategy to production to QA to the account team, everybody needs to be working off the same understanding of who does what and in what order. Those handoffs need to be documented so everyone stays aligned.

The doorway into the agency. That’s usually an entry-level role like an account coordinator, a junior SEO specialist, or a junior content marketing specialist. People move through those roles, and they need step-by-step guidance because they aren’t as adept yet at connecting the dots and figuring it out for themselves. That documentation has to be well done and up to date, and it’s the easiest one to keep current, because every new person in the seat reads it closely.

Where strategy, sales, and accounts overlap. This is new business and account renewals. Those sequences are time bound and need people collaborating in specific ways on a deadline. This one breaks my weekly rule, and it has to. When a renewal comes around once a year, nobody remembers exactly how it went last time, and documentation makes sure nobody’s guessing when the stakes are highest.

Everything else belongs in the system of record

Everything else, I’d rather build straight into the workflows, templates, and protocols in your project management system, or whatever your system of record is, than keep a fat stack of documents describing how the system works.

In practice that means templates for your most common workflows, protocols for how the team works inside the system, documentation that lives there and is linked properly, and automation wherever you can get it, so nobody is guessing who does what next. I’d much rather have the system be clean, clear, up to date, and working than have a document that describes what it’s supposed to do.

The difference shows up the day the process changes. When the process lives in a template, updating the template updates the process for the next project that uses it. When the process lives in a document, somebody has to remember the document exists.

A lean approach still has to survive a resignation

The fair objection is the one every owner raises. What happens when someone leaves? If the knowledge isn’t written down, it walks out the door with them.

It does if it lives in someone’s head. The answer is to put it where the work happens. A task template with the steps, the owner, and the handoff built in survives a resignation better than a long process doc nobody has opened since the person who wrote it moved on.

And the four places above are the ones that matter most when someone leaves. The doorway roles turn over the most, the cross-department handoffs break first when a person is missing, and a gap in the renewal sequence is the one that costs you revenue.

What I’m railing against is depth

I call it death by depth, and I’ve fallen into that trap before. Deep docs are hard to produce well, hard to keep updated, and usually so big, sprawling, and esoteric that they fall out of use and don’t end up helping anybody do anything.

The depth feels responsible while you’re writing it. It feels like you’re protecting the agency. But a short doc that’s right does more for the team than a long one that was right when somebody wrote it.

The four places above are where I start. Past them, I’m still working out where the line sits, because it moves with the team and with the work.