Monday, February 17, 2025
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Over the past few months, we’ve spoken with over 50 Product Managers in B2B SaaS companies, mostly ranging from 50 to 500 employees, to understand how they manage product knowledge. The conversations revealed a shared challenge: ensuring that product knowledge is accessible, up-to-date, and actually used by teams without constant interruptions to the PM’s workflow.
While every company has its own approach, the patterns were clear—most PMs spend a significant portion of their time answering repetitive questions, directing colleagues to documentation, and trying to keep various teams aligned on the latest product updates.
1. Documentation Is Essential, But Not Enough
Most PMs agree that documentation is critical. Companies typically use tools like Confluence, Notion, Google Docs, or internal wikis to store product information. Some teams maintain structured release notes, FAQs, and internal repositories. Others create Slack channels dedicated to product updates or automate notifications via Jira or project management tools.
Yet, documentation alone doesn’t solve the problem. A PM from a mid-sized SaaS company put it bluntly:
"Even with well-prepared FAQs and release notes, teams still struggle to find the right details in the moment."
Another PM shared:
"We document everything in Notion, so sales has all the info they need without DMing me. However, they still do."
The reality is that even the best documentation systems fall short when information is scattered, hard to search, or simply ignored.
2. Slack Is Where Knowledge Lives—For Better or Worse
Nearly every PM we spoke with acknowledged that Slack is the go-to place for internal knowledge-sharing. Teams ask questions, share links, and discuss product changes in Slack channels.
The problem? Information gets buried. One PM described it as a constant loop:
"Endless questions in Slack where the answer is already documented elsewhere, but nobody knows where to find it—or they’re too lazy to look."
Others noted that Slack’s real-time nature often means that valuable insights get lost in the scroll:
"Messages have equal value in Slack, making it hard to surface the truly important ones when needed."
As a result, PMs find themselves repeatedly answering the same questions or redirecting teammates to existing documentation.
3. Sales and Customer Success Depend on PMs for Product Knowledge
A recurring theme was the constant demand for product knowledge from sales and customer success teams. While some companies rely on internal documentation, many PMs still get pulled into troubleshooting, customer objections, or feature clarifications.
"It’s not just about documentation. Sales teams don’t always study the product deeply, so they rely on PMs to explain things. That’s a huge time sink."
Others attempt structured enablement strategies, such as:
Yet, even with these efforts, PMs still get flooded with questions—many of them repetitive.
From these conversations, three core challenges emerged:
The most effective PMs take a multi-layered approach to knowledge sharing:
✅ Making knowledge self-serve – Encouraging teams to search first before asking questions, often by integrating documentation into chat tools like Slack.
✅ Automating responses – Setting up bots or AI assistants to answer repetitive questions and surface relevant information from internal wikis.
✅ Building structured learning – Providing onboarding materials, recorded demos, and structured sales enablement content.
✅ Reinforcing good habits – Educating teams on where to find information and ensuring that sales and CS teams develop product literacy.
Product Managers shouldn’t have to play the role of a human search engine. Question Base captures valuable knowledge from Slack conversations, automatically surfaces past answers when similar questions arise, and connects teams to the right documentation—right inside Slack.
Instead of answering the same question for the tenth time, PMs can focus on building great products. If your team struggles with repetitive questions, scattered documentation, or knowledge getting lost in Slack, Question Base makes product information instantly accessible.
Try it in your Slack workspace today.