How to Break Knowledge Silos and Future-Proof Your Tech Team
- August 10, 2025
- Posted by: Mike Rocha
- Category: Startups
Building a high-performing, trustworthy technology team is no small feat. From startups working with product development companies or established enterprises considering fractional CTO services to strengthen leadership, finding the right people to drive your company forward is critical to any successful tech company’s business strategy.
I’ve advised and consulted for dozens of companies both small and large over my career, and if there’s one unifying characteristic that sets the successful ones apart from the less successful ones is the presence and contribution of developers that are fully bought in and entrenched in their company’s vision, values and success. These are what some may call the ‘lifers’ – ground-floor employees that work every day to driving the company forward and have a direct hand in its success as a result. These team members make it easier for executives and founders to sleep at night. While there’s a long list of stressors and challenges in any company, having these types of people on the team make that list just that much shorter.
But with all the benefits that these types of team members provide, there is one critical but often-overlooked side effect of these situations, one that can come with major risk to your business – knowledge silos.
When a company first starts out—especially startup product development companies—there’s often a reliance on one or two key people as the subject matter experts. This might be a senior developer, a CTO, or a lead product strategist. As the growth plan of a company unfolds, leaders often fill capability gaps without replicating expertise across the team. This may work in the short term but, over time, it introduces significant operational risk.
On the technical side, this often takes the form of a senior-level developer or CTO – someone who was integral in the build of the company’s platform, and knows its code and capabilities better than anyone else on the team by a significant margin. It’s easy to plan for the future knowing that this person will always be there as a technical safety net, but what happens if that person is removed from the equation, whether from illness, churn, leaves of absence or otherwise? Expecting one or a few key employees to always be there to keep the lights on carries an immeasurable amount of risk to a business. This over-dependence often brings with it unhealthy work-life balance expectations as well, where those key employees are tasked with dealing with urgent situations at any hour of the day, or are expected to carry on with their regular tasks while away on vacation. These expectations tend to breed employee dissatisfaction over time, increasing risk of churn and/or burnout. Over-reliance on a few individuals creates fragility and can derail even the best company growth plans.
Here are some ways technology companies can mitigate these risks and work towards knocking down knowledge silos:
Document all the things
Documentation is one of the first things that gets sent to the backlog in crunch periods and times of crisis, and for many companies, crunch periods are more the rule than the exception. And understandably so – if given the choice of building a new feature that drives customer value and has the potential to increase a platform’s user base versus building a complete set of API documentation, company leadership will choose the former 9 times out of 10. But smart leadership recognizes that a lack of documentation is like any other type of technical debt – it needs to be tackled a bit at a time before it becomes unmanageable. Establish a policy within the technology team that allocates a small but fixed percentage of each developer’s time to documenting an aspect of the platform. That slow drip will yield results much faster than expected, and without neglecting feature development.
Cross-training for success
Effective technology teams build out their team’s roles and responsibilities based on what their team is capable of, not what they know. While it’s natural to try and pigeonhole team members into working on the things they know best, just as with technical debt and documentation, a well-rounded sprint should always include some aspect of cross-training. Have developers that don’t normally handle one aspect of your platform take on some maintenance or low-priority tasks to get comfortable, and don’t be afraid to give your developers tasks that may be outside of their comfort zone. This will nurture a more robust team, with the added benefit of increased morale and engagement.
Work knowledge sharing into your SDLC
There is no shortage of tools and approaches that a development team can take to better incorporate knowledge sharing into their software development lifecycle.
Paired coding is a collaborative programming practice where two developers work together at one workstation or in one video session — one writes the code (the “driver”) while the other reviews and guides in real time (the “observer” or “navigator”). While paired coding is not suitable for every team on a full-time basis, there are aspects of it that can be employed on any size team in a knowledge sharing effort. During sprint planning, consider looking for opportunities to have tickets be tackled in a paired coding effort.
Code review is a great opportunity for a developer to learn more about code they’re not familiar with. Consider establishing a robust code review process to ensure developers are reviewing each other’s code before deployment or delivery to QA. For teams already utilizing a code review process, consider adapting a cross-functional approach, ensuring that review happens between developers of different disciplines, languages or platforms (e.g. frontend vs. backend, web vs. mobile, etc.) This type of approach may also be utilized in the quality assurance process on smaller teams without a separate QA practice, where developers perform peer testing. This type of peer testing effort can expedite knowledge sharing on both the codebase as well as the platform’s functional capabilities.
Make it a priority to eliminate caretakers
The caretaker role is a very common blind spot in many companies, opening up a substantial single point of failure. There are countless examples of caretakers on technical teams that are heavily relied upon to keep processes running smoothly:
- The devops engineer that is tasked with weekly after-hours server patches so as to not disrupt customers during their work day
- The database admininstrator that manually runs several SQL queries on Sunday night and combines them into a spreadsheet for executive team review Monday morning
- The developer that checks the production error log every morning at 8am to ensure nothing went wrong with the nightly ETL process
- The CTO that performs production releases twice a month on Tuesday evenings and tests the system to ensure nothing broke in the process
These caretaker roles and responsibilities are not only an impediment to growth, they bring about substantial risk to the company’s overall health and its ability to deliver value to its customers. They also expedite employee burnout, accelerating potential for churn and leaving the company exposed to even greater risk. Ensure these tasks are captured as high-priority targets for automation, and ensure they’re tackled a bit at a time, just as any other technical debt. In the meantime, teams should prioritize coverage plans for manual tasks, ensuring there are never less than two team members that can handle any business-critical task at any given time.
Technical knowledge silos will always be a reality for fast-growing technology companies. But smart companies can recognize these dangers and proactively tackle silos using a combination of the above knowledge sharing and collaboration strategies. By breaking down these barriers, organizations not only reduce operational risks but also unlock greater innovation, agility, and scalable growth. This holistic approach ensures knowledge is shared, risks are mitigated, and the business is better positioned for long-term success.