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3 changes: 3 additions & 0 deletions docs/best-practices/index.mdx
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Expand Up @@ -57,3 +57,6 @@ This section is intended for:

- **[Pre-Production Testing](./pre-production-testing.mdx)** Experience-driven testing practices covering failure
injection, load testing, and operational validation.

- **[Knowledge Hub](./knowledge-hub.mdx)** Best practices for building and maintaining an internal Temporal knowledge hub
that accelerates developer onboarding, reduces platform team support load, and establishes consistent standards.
146 changes: 146 additions & 0 deletions docs/best-practices/knowledge-hub.mdx
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---
id: knowledge-hub
title: Knowledge Hub
sidebar_label: Knowledge Hub
description:
Best practices for building and maintaining an internal Temporal knowledge hub that accelerates developer onboarding,
reduces platform team support load, and establishes consistent standards across your organization.
toc_max_heading_level: 3
keywords:
- temporal best practices
- operational excellence
tags:
- Best Practices
---

As organizations scale their Temporal adoption, the use cases become more complex, and it can be difficult to locate all the relevant information you need.
Tribal knowledge gets siloed within teams, leading to inconsistent patterns for Workflow design, error handling, and testing.
This fragmentation leads to an increased burden on support, as well as slower onboarding for new developers.
You may also inadvertently introduce security vulnerabilities or compliance gaps.
To prevent these issues, you can establish an internal Temporal knowledge hub to address common issues that arise when multiple teams
adopt Temporal independently.

This guide covers what belongs in a knowledge hub, how to communicate it, and how to keep it useful over time.
To bootstrap your knowledge hub, use the
[Temporal Platform Hub](https://kawofong.github.io/temporal-platform-hub/) template as a starting point.

## What belongs in your knowledge hub

Although Temporal itself has [thorough documentation](https://docs.temporal.io/), not all of it applies to your organization or your teams' use cases.
The knolwedge hub distills the documentation into just the specific information your teams need.
One way to organize the content is according to where developers are in their journey.
The following sample outline shows what sections to include.

### Evaluate

The Evaluation section helps developers understand what Temporal is and whether it fits their problem.
Goals for this section are to increase knowledge hub traffic and decrease the support question rate.
Include the following items in this section:

- **Temporal overview** explains what Temporal is, why your organization chose it, and the business value metrics
that justify adoption.
- **Decision framework** provides qualifying questions, good and bad use cases, and alternative recommendations so
developers can determine whether Temporal fits their problem.

### Build

The Build section is aimed at developers who are just getting started with Temporal.
The goal of this section is to give developers a single path from zero to a running Workflow.
Include the following items in this section:

- **Getting started** walks developers through a 30-minute quickstart covering environment setup, a starter template,
and running a first Workflow locally and on Temporal Cloud. Use an existing Temporal [quickstart](/quickstarts), or build one from your own use case.
- **Learning paths** provides self-paced courses from foundational to advanced topics, tailored by persona, and links
to [Temporal's free training](https://learn.temporal.io/).

### Ship

The Ship section provides the architecture standards and guardrails developers need to go from a local prototype to a production
deployment.
The goal for this section is to provide reference material developers need to reduce their time to production.
Include the following items in this section:

- **Architecture and standards** documents Namespace conventions, connectivity requirements, and Worker deployment
standards that every team follows.
- **Cost guidance** explains billable Actions, storage tiers, and cost-saving tips so developers build cost-efficient
Workflows.
- **Shared responsibility** defines an ownership matrix between Platform and Application teams across IAM,
infrastructure, development, deployment, observability, and operations.
- **Design patterns** curates Workflow patterns with descriptions and code sample links that developers can adopt
directly.

### Operate

The Operate section gives developers the tools to self-serve during incidents and find answers without escalating to the Platform team.
The goal of this section is to decrease the number of questions to support.
Include the following items in this section:

- **Troubleshooting and escalation** covers observability tools, runbooks for common issues, escalation paths, SLAs,
and example alert definitions.
- **Support and FAQs** documents your support tier, ticket submission process, Temporal account contacts, expert-led
session types, and frequently asked questions.

## Measuring success of your knowledge hub

After you've created your knolwedge hub, establish metrics to measure its effectiveness for your organization.
The following table shows example indicators that organizations use to measure the impact of their knowledge hub,
along with realistic before-and-after targets:

| Metric | Before Knowledge Hub | Target | What it tells you |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Time to first Workflow** | Days to weeks (developers piece together scattered resources) | Under 30 minutes (developers follow a single getting started guide) | Measures onboarding friction. A short time to first Workflow signals that your getting started guide is effective. |
| **Time to Workflow in production** | Weeks to months (blocked by unclear Namespace provisioning and deployment processes) | Under 2 weeks (developers follow documented self-service provisioning) | Measures the gap between development and delivering value. Long times point to missing documentation and automation opportunities. |
| **Support question rate** | 20-30+ questions per week to the Platform team via Slack | Fewer than 5 per week | Measures self-service resolution. A declining trend shows that developers are finding answers in the knowledge hub instead of asking the Platform team. |
| **Knowledge Hub traffic** | N/A (no centralized resource exists) | Steady or growing page views per month | Identifies which content developers rely on and where gaps remain. Declining traffic on a page may indicate it is outdated; high traffic with high bounce rates may indicate the page is not answering the question. |

These metrics create a feedback loop: measure, identify gaps, improve content, and measure again.

## What doesn't belong in your knowledge hub

A knowledge hub is not a mirror of [Temporal's official documentation](https://docs.temporal.io/).
Avoid duplicating SDK API references, concept explanations, or release notes that Temporal already maintains.
When that content changes, your copy becomes a source of confusion rather than clarity.
Instead, link to the official docs and reserve your knowledge hub for organization-specific decisions, conventions,
and operational procedures that Temporal's public documentation does not cover.

## How to maintain and communicate your knowledge hub

Having a thorough, complete knowledge hub isn't useful if the information becomes stale, or if developers don't know it exists.

### Assign ownership

Designate a Platform team or developer experience team as the owner.
This team is responsible for initial content creation, ongoing maintenance, and reviewing contributions from
application teams.

### Make it discoverable

A knowledge hub that developers can not find is the same as not having one.

- Register a short URL (for example, `go/temporal`) that redirects to the knowledge hub.
- Pin the link in your Temporal-related communication channels (Slack, Microsoft Teams).
- When answering questions in Slack, respond with a link to the relevant knowledge hub page instead of re-explaining
inline.
This builds the habit of checking the hub first.

### Review metrics regularly

Track the metrics from [Measuring success of your knowledge hub](#measuring-success-of-your-knowledge-hub) on a regular cadence to identify what is
working and where gaps remain.

Capture every question that reaches the Platform team through Slack or tickets as a candidate for new content.

Solicit contributions from application teams through a lightweight process such as a pull request template.

### Keep content current

- **Review on a cadence**: Review each page at least quarterly.
Assign a review owner and date to each page so staleness is visible.
- **Tie updates to events**: Update the knowledge hub whenever your organization changes its Temporal architecture,
updates its deployment tooling, or modifies its shared responsibility model.
- **Prune aggressively**: Remove or archive content that no longer applies.
Outdated documentation is worse than no documentation because developers follow it and get unexpected results.

## Get started

Start with the [Temporal Platform Hub template](https://kawofong.github.io/temporal-platform-hub/) as your foundation.
3 changes: 3 additions & 0 deletions sidebars.js
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Expand Up @@ -651,6 +651,9 @@ module.exports = {
'best-practices/managing-aps-limits',
'best-practices/cloud-access-control',
'best-practices/security-controls',
'best-practices/worker',
'best-practices/knowledge-hub',
'production-deployment/multi-tenant-patterns'
],
},
{
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