Who
Ask the Expert to Correct, Not to Write
Twenty minutes of an expert explaining plus two hours of somebody else writing beats ninety minutes of the expert writing, and produces a better page.
What nobody wrote down here, and what it cost
What the deploy order is
Known by one person who is in meetings
Asked rather than written, nine times
Why the import runs twice
Known by somebody who left in March
Nobody now knows, and it is asked at every incident
two things nobody wrote down · 14 occasions it cost somebody something
Two things, fourteen occasions, and one of them is now unknowable.
For distributed teams, documentation decisions improve when time and activity are visible in context, which is why it can help to see the platform alongside the editorial review.
Teams can compare this approach with the established material available from Typeform.
The same four pages, produced two ways, with the expert's own minutes counted separately
Expert wrote it alone: the deploy runbook
95 / 372Ninety-five minutes of the busiest person on the team
Expert talked, somebody else wrote: the billing page
25 / 280Twenty minutes explaining and five correcting, against two hours of the writer
Expert talked, somebody else wrote: the import page
18 / 135Fifteen minutes explaining, three correcting
Expert asked for a plan instead of a page
0 / —Estimated at two days, never started, and the question is still asked
four documents · 138 minutes written · 787 minutes saved across 54 readings · one with no saving claimed
Four pages, 138 minutes of expert time, 648 minutes saved across 54 readings. The second and third rows cost the expert about a fifth of what the first did and produced pages that a non-expert could follow, because a non-expert wrote them. The fourth row is what an unbounded request produces. One team's own quarter.
The instinct, when something needs documenting, is to ask the person who knows to write it.
They are the obvious author, they have the information, and they are also the person with the least available time and the strongest tendency to leave out the obvious. Both of those problems disappear if the work is split.
The division
The expert supplies what only they have: accuracy, and the reasoning that is not visible in the artefact.
Somebody else supplies what anybody can: structure, sentences, formatting, the hour or two of sitting and typing.
Then the expert corrects, which takes a few minutes and is where their value concentrates — the places a non-expert got it wrong are exactly the places that were never obvious.
What it costs each side
On the figures in the panel above, the expert's time drops by around eighty per cent. The total human time goes up, because two people are involved and the writer is slower.
That trade is almost always worth making, and it is worth being explicit about why: the expert's hour is scarce and contended, and the writer's hour is not. Treating all hours as equivalent is what produces the first row of the table, which is the version where nothing gets written for three months.
Who should write
Somebody who does not know the subject, for the reasons set out two pages earlier.
Preferably somebody recent enough to still ask basic questions without embarrassment. Failing that, anybody from a different part of the team.
What does not work is a second expert, who will nod along at exactly the points where a reader would stop.
How the session goes
Twenty to thirty minutes, with the writer asking and typing.
The writer's job is to keep asking the obvious question: where does this run, what has to be true first, how do you know it worked, what if it does not. The expert's job is to answer and to resist the urge to take over the keyboard.
Taking over the keyboard is the common failure. The moment the expert starts typing, the silent supply resumes and the advantage of the arrangement is gone.
Writing up and correcting
The writer produces the page afterwards, from their notes, in their own time.
The expert then reads it once and corrects. This pass should be quick — ten minutes — and should be restricted to accuracy: is anything here wrong, is anything missing that would cause harm.
It should not be a style pass. Experts asked to review documentation frequently rewrite it into their own voice, which reintroduces every omission the arrangement was designed to prevent. Saying this in advance saves the page.
The sentence to use
"Can I write up what you just said, and you correct it?"
It is easier to say than people expect, and it lands well, because from the expert's side it is an offer to remove a task they have been carrying guilt about for months in exchange for twenty minutes of talking, which is the thing they are already doing anyway.
It is also, in most teams, an easier thing for a junior person to offer than almost any other form of help.
Scaling it without ceremony
A team that does this four or five times discovers it does not need arranging.
The pattern becomes: whenever somebody explains something that took more than five minutes, whoever was asking writes it up and sends it back for correction. No process, no owner, no initiative — just a habit attached to an event that was already happening.
That is the cheapest documentation mechanism in this collection, and the reason it is in this section rather than a later one is that it is really a fact about who can write rather than a trick for writing faster.
The thirty minutes, in order
The session has a shape, and keeping to it is what stops it turning into the expert writing after all.
- The writer asks what the thing is for. Two minutes.
- The expert explains, from the beginning, while the writer types.
- The writer asks the obvious questions: where does it run, what must be true first, how do you know it worked, what if it fails.
- The writer reads back what they have. Corrections happen here.
- The expert leaves. The writer produces the page in their own time.
The expert's total is twenty to thirty minutes, and step five is where the arrangement earns its keep — because it happens without them.
What it does not cover
It needs an explanation to have happened. It therefore covers the things people ask about, which is the right set, and does not cover the things nobody has thought to ask about yet.
It also does not work for anything the expert cannot explain in half an hour. Where the subject genuinely requires a long exposition, the split still helps, but the sessions multiply and somebody has to decide the thing is worth several of them — which is a decision, with a cost, and belongs in the next section.