Curri is a construction delivery service and logistics platform that helps its customers scale operations and boost efficiency. Data is critical to what the Curri team does—to scale, increase efficiency, and manage logistics for its customers. Asif Ahmed is the Director of Data at Curri, where he strives to empower the rest of the company to make data-driven decisions. "I see myself as a 'data gardener' who keeps the soil healthy and plants trees, empowering others to come and pick fruit from the 'data orchard,' if you will," he says.

When scaling requires documentation

To Asif, documentation is important so that everyone can understand where others stand. "When you define something for yourself in writing, you're also defining it for others—whether it's values, processes, or outcomes," he says. "The alternative to documenting these things is to repeat yourself over and over again, which just isn't scalable."

Plus, at a growing company like Curri, documentation creates a welcoming environment where people know what to expect and how to succeed. New hires can quickly see what their responsibilities or processes are, and existing employees can quickly get up to speed on the work of their cross-functional partners. "Working together is much more welcoming and efficient when you have documentation because everyone can easily get on the same page," Asif says.

Saving time with documentation

When Curri was fewer than ten people, they could get away with just tapping someone on the shoulder and asking them a question. However, that level of interruption requires a lot of time and can disrupt workflows. So the team adopted Slab to house their internal knowledge base and power their documentation.

For example, if an engineer wanted to understand a new feature, they would have to either ask the developer responsible for it or go through the product to figure it out. With documentation in Slab, they can read about how the feature works and see an architectural diagram and screenshots. It's a much faster way to understand a feature without taking up someone else's time—or much of their own.

“As a company grows, you need a space where people can go and learn quickly without always needing to ask someone.”

Writing information in Slab has saved time by eliminating the need to ask repeat questions. It's also added clarity to the thought process—people are forced to communicate more clearly in writing than in speech. Clear concise documentation also saves time for the reader.

With the entire company using Slab, Curri has also seen the development of a deeper understanding of cross-functional teams' work. People can peruse other team's topics to see what's been worked on and understand why decisions were made. This provides additional context and helps people see the bigger picture, making everyone more effective at their jobs.

Speeding up onboarding and providing new hires context to help them succeed

When a new hire joins Curri, they start using Slab on their first day. With the simplicity of Slab's UI, everyone can jump right in: "Slab gets out of people's way and allows them to read and write documentation quickly," says Asif. With robust documentation in Slab, new hires can quickly understand why the team built certain features and how they impact future decision-making.

For new hires and the whole team, commonly asked questions are linked to Slab articles instead of relying on someone to share the information, further ensuring consistency and accessibility for every team member. And for those who might be too shy to ask a question in the first place, Slab makes sure they can find the information they want.

“Especially during onboarding, people might hesitate or worry about asking too many questions, but with documentation, people can self-serve—and sometimes stumble upon information they didn't even know they should ask about.”

Consolidating information enables curiosity

When knowledge is documented, it's easier for the team to operate and remember why they did something, how they did it, or what they achieved. Without such documentation, people often hesitate to ask questions or look up answers on their own—leaving them without information that could make their jobs easier or more efficient. Plus, people forget things.

“Ultimately, the more a person can connect the dots at a company, the more impact they'll make. When people read documentation, people communicate more around the most relevant information, they offer more insights, and they ask more questions.”

All of this documentation and knowledge sharing also allows for more curiosity, which feeds Curri's culture of transparency. "I think people should be curious about different aspects of their company, and Slab is a tool that enables that—rather than siloed communication across multiple tools," Asif says. "By connecting the dots and enabling curiosity, Slab helps the team creatively solve problems and have a deeper impact."

Crafting a culture of healthy transparency and eliminating siloes

As part of Curri's culture of transparency, they believe that documentation helps the team understand and communicate with each other, which is why they use Slab across all functions.

For example, Curri uses Slab to reduce siloes through the data team's weekly newsletter. Asif decided to use Slab for the newsletter for its simplicity over other tools with tickets: "A document is simpler than linking to multiple tickets," he says. This weekly documentation helps the Data team record their progress and share their work with the rest of the organization in a tool that's already widely used. It's also easy to view past updates—the reader just has to scroll down.

While in some organizations, Engineering and Product might rely on different tools—like Google Docs or Jira—to document their processes, at Curri, everyone uses Slab, thus avoiding the issue of cross-functional teams lacking access to certain tools.

With every team using Slab at Curri, from Product to Ops and the Executive team, they avoid siloes, create accessibility and transparency, and drive more use of the knowledge-sharing platform.

“The beauty of Slab is that the more people use it, the more useful it is. It's really nice to find things in life that work that way. The more you use it, the better it gets.”

Increasing exposure to ideas while working remotely

As a fully remote company, Asif and the Curri team know all too well that exposure to others across the organization can be limited, but they see Slab as a healthy way to stay informed and get exposure to content they otherwise may not have seen.

“We rely on documentation as a way to increase exposure and context as people use Slab.”

The value of this exposure is that it creates connections across the organization. "One of my roles as Director of Data is to be a dot connector—when I see people working two disparate things who could benefit from each other's knowledge, I connect them," Asif says. The more Asif knows about these disparate dots, the more he can create those connections—to others across the organization and to data relevant to their work. And more and more team members can make those connections themselves through their own curiosity.

Curri's commitment to driving transparency and cross-functional understanding through knowledge sharing helps them better connect the dots as the organization scales and connects the many dots of their customer's logistics.