Creating a Cohesive Company Wiki

How Mode gets teams on the same page, literally

Angela Wu Li

While at

Mode⁠

, I built an internal company wiki while we were between 100-200 employees. Below, I’ve summarized the lessons and learnings from this very essential, very cross-functional, and very fun creation. Hope you enjoy!

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Mode is a fast-growing company that’s evolving every day. There are new employees, new teams, new features, new processes, and as a company grows, you have step back farther and farther to see the big picture. It’s easy to get sidetracked and buried in your own corner of the microcosm. To maintain alignment while growing, it’s critical that everyone is on the same page. To help do this, we've created a common space to ensure that everyone is receiving the same, most important information.

Although the need for an internal company wiki was obvious, it was less obvious how we would do it. How do we decide what goes in it? How do we structure information? How much of a freedom should everyone have in adding information? Below, I’ve laid out some principles that guided the creation of this doc:

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This doc was designed to be customized for your own company.

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Copy this doc

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and get started!

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Establish a Single Source of Truth

Having a single source of truth is something we really believe in at Mode.

This is true for data⁠

, and it’s also true for all other kinds of information. We use a lot of different tools and software — Slack, Dropbox, GitHub — and all of these tools have their own purposes, but we needed one tool to pull all of it together into a single place, and Coda was our solution. Saying no to duplicated and outdated info keeps our processes efficient and helps us move faster, together.

Support Autonomy with Structure

Creating a company wiki is a cross-functional project which will require input from every department. The best way to get buy-in is to make everyone a part of the process. Asking department leaders to be responsible for the content on their own team’s page is the best way to get the most accurate, important information across. At the same time, providing a basic structure helps keep information in the wiki consistent and expectations in check.

Less Is More

That said, it’s important to be discerning about what information is included in the wiki, and what’s not. A good company wiki functions like Grand Central Station, or any central hub for transit: a starting point for accessing everything else. People come and go for the information they need, but don’t need to stay for very long. Outside of onboarding, most people don’t need to spend their entire day buried in this doc (unless you’re me).

We’ve limited our wiki to include only the most important information:

WHY we do what we do is driven by our