When your documentation workflow lives in one person's head

I'll admit it. I've felt good about being the go-to person for a task.

Then I'd plan a vacation, and my manager would ask me to get someone ready to cover while I was away. I hadn't documented all of it. Some or most of it was in my head. So I'd (begrudgingly) spend the next few days writing everything down, on top of my actual work.

If you look after your company's docs, you might be that person right now. You know which automations to run, which Claude skills or routines keep the help center updated, and where everything lives. When you go on holiday or leave, the system stops.

That's a knowledge silo, and docs teams have more of them than ever. The fix is to move your docs workflow onto a shared surface that several people can use reliably, give each automation one clear job, and test the setup with a pretend vacation before anyone actually leaves.

Why AI made the go-to person problem bigger

Cut to the AI era, and ironically, I believe this 'problem' has multiplied.

We can now build complex automations that live partly in routines and skills, partly in documentation, and partly in our heads. We're owning more work, diverse work even. A single person can now run a docs operation that used to take a small team, and the skills, routines and prompts behind it all sit with whoever built them.

That's brilliant until the builder is out. The skill is in their account, the order of operations is in their head, and the reason a step exists is nowhere at all. We wrote about one team where this happened when their technical writer left, in should you hire a technical writer?

How to tell if your docs depend on one person

My vacation story is the easiest test I know. Imagine the person who runs your docs workflow is going on holiday tomorrow, and ask:

1. How many days would they need to write everything down first?

2. Could someone else run every automation, skill and routine without asking them a single question?

3. Does anyone else know which step runs when?

4. If a release ships while they're away, does the help center still get updated on time, and does anyone notice if an automation silently breaks halfway through?

If the honest answer to the first question is "a few days", you have a silo. It doesn't mean anyone did anything wrong. It usually means one capable person kept making things better and nobody else needed to know how.

How to break the silo before someone leaves

Writing a handover doc is a start, but a doc about a workflow goes stale as fast as the workflow changes. These steps hold up longer:

• List every moving part. Write down each automation, Claude skill, routine and prompt your docs depend on, where it lives, and who can run it today.

• Move them somewhere shared. Out of personal accounts, into a place the team can run.

• Give each automation one job. A skill that does five things only makes sense to the person who built it. Split it until each piece does one thing well and its name says what that is.

• Run a real handover drill. Have a second person run the full workflow for a week while the go-to person only watches. Every question the stand-in asks is a gap to close, so write the answer down where the automation lives and not in a separate handover doc nobody will open again.

• Notice when you've outgrown skills. When several people need the same automations, keeping them in personal skills and routines gets fragile quickly.

My bet, we realised scalable automation can't permanently live in routines and skills. As a workflow gets complex, a surface multiple people can come to reliably, with agents tightly bounded to a use case executed extremely well, becomes a necessity.

Where Pageloop fits

I'll be honest. I even debated how valuable Pageloop really would be. "Claude could do this if someone spent enough time!"

Then a stream of teams, technical writers, and Product, came to us because they wanted a 'centralized system for docs automation'. Huh, interesting! If you're one of these people reading this, that bit of misery you were in was very validating to me, sorry.

All this to say, you should check out Pageloop. I'm joking. Okay, only half joking.

Pageloop is that shared surface for docs. The agent watches your sources and drafts doc changes into one place the whole team can see. Anyone can pick up an edit, a few people own publishing, and nothing depends on one person's skills folder. A person still approves every change. It gives us well-orchestrated agents that are no longer person-dependent, while still removing tedious, repetitive work.

But seriously, I'm noticing a point where my needs outgrow my skills and routines, and I reach for tools to do the heavy lifting. Who's the go-to person for docs on your team, and what happens when they take a week off?


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Manfred On The Jungfrau Description: 1922P170 Manfred On The Jungfrau, 1837 By John Martin Scene from Lord Byron's poem 'Manfred'