How Kinnek Grows Team Knowledge with Notejoy
Kinnek is a leading online marketplace connecting small and medium-sized businesses to their suppliers--and to each other. Based in New York, Kinnek's mission is to empower small businesses to purchase painlessly by finding the right products, suppliers, and quotes in one place.
The challenge of building a learning organization
As a growing business, the Kinnek team found themselves to be in an environment of constant learning. From onboarding new employees to operating their business, the leadership team quickly realized that scaling their team's knowledge sharing capabilities was a critical part of growing and scaling the business.
While initially they had turned to a mix of tools like Google Docs and internal wikis to document their team knowledge, they quickly found that it was a challenge to get things written down as well as access it afterward. They had a "nightmarish amount of Google Docs" which were difficult to search. However, if team members could find the knowledge, it made a big difference.
How Kinnek leverages Notejoy for capturing and sharing knowledge
When the Kinnek team started using Notejoy, they found a knowledge management solution with an easy to use interface that anyone in the company could pick up and start to use. To improve the accessibility of documents, they imported many of their existing Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides into Notejoy and used Notejoy's Slack integration, a communication platform that everyone in the company used heavily. That way, materials like company all hands presentations and getting started guides were searchable for everyone and content was easy to create and access within Slack.
Notejoy improved the Kinnek team's ability to access team knowledge, collaborate across groups, and stay up-to-date. When new employees joined the team, they got added to Notejoy with searchable access to common questions. When the customer success team needed to communicate a request to another team, they simplified their former workflow by documenting it in Notejoy. With Notejoy, someone looking for a status update can not only see who'd viewed the notes but also stay up-to-date on the most recent conversations.
Notejoy became home for not only these status updates and reference materials, but also a repository for new knowledge as well. When the customer success team was learning how to access data analytics with SQL queries, they quickly made a reference notebook in Notejoy for everyone to contribute queries they'd written. Doing this made new examples accessible for everyone. "Searching for things in Notejoy is a pleasure," said Ross Liberti, Director of Customer Success at Kinnek. "Google Drive feels like the Wild West sometimes. There are hundreds of docs and it's overwhelming to find stuff in there. If you have a note in Notejoy, it's a lot easier to find."
"Notejoy has helped us really live "transparency" as a value," said Karthik Sridharan, CEO of Kinnek. "A lot of organizations like to say they're transparent, but it's difficult to embody that principle in day-to-day operations. Information such as financial projections, Board of Director meeting notes, and long-term strategy documents are not just technically available to team members, they're easily searchable and discoverable by them."
"We've come to rely on Notejoy as our internal knowledge system, ensuring everything we've learned isn't lost to the sands of time. It serves a completely different purpose than Slack, Google Docs, or any other solution out there. It's changed the game for us in terms of knowledge-sharing across our company. Every time I see people contributing to Notejoy at our company, I get the feeling that we're building our company's long-term strategic assets base."