A worked example of [[Shared Second Brain|building a shared second brain]] at organisational scale, traced through pain → cluster → quality bar → method → tool. Extends the [[Shared second brain example - Expertise Radar|Expertise Radar example]] - the same queryable graph, but now turned into a productised expertise function with named leadership and outward-facing channels. The case is [[Experts Hub]] at [[Brainhub]] - what survived rotation through two acquisitions. ## In one line Internal [[Expertise Radar]] works but the value stays inside Engineering → cross-departmental expertise-as-product cluster, non-negotiables *mission alignment* + *cross-department reusability* → productised expertise function with a named [[Tech Evangelist]] role and outward channels → [[Notion]] Enterprise + dedicated leadership. ^one-line ## Starting point ![[Shared second brain example - Expertise Radar#^one-line]] That works for internal queries - Engineering can ask the graph anything. It fails when the question becomes *how does this expertise reach clients and candidates?* ## The acts in one line each The Expertise Radar is queryable internally - any team can traverse problems, tools, experts. But Marketing still has no story, Sales pitches without naming the problems solved, Employer Branding runs events without a "why us", and producing content for any channel still requires a developer's full attention. The graph exists; nothing systematic pulls from it. ^trail-line Cross-departmental expertise as a product - rare-to-medium creation, high consequence, consumed not just by Engineering but by Marketing, Sales, EB, Recruitment, and external clients and candidates. Non-negotiables: *mission alignment* and *cross-department reusability*. ^profile-line Productised expertise function ([[Experts Hub]]) - a unified mission ([[Software Delivery Excellence]]), a named steward ([[Tech Evangelist]] reporting to CEO), the Expertise Radar as structural core, and a capture-transform-reuse discipline that turns one developer conversation into many channel outputs. ^method-line ## Full walkthrough ### Knowledge trail mapping The [[Brainhub's Expertise Radar|Expertise Radar]] works - any team can query the graph for problems, tools, experts, and decisions. But the value stays inside Engineering. The trail goes cold at the department boundary: - Marketing wants developer-authored content but developers are on projects with no time for storytelling; Marketing meanwhile has no story of its own to lean on - Sales pitches without naming the problems being solved; the radar has all the problems mapped but Sales does not consume them - Employer Branding runs events without a "why us"; the radar has the experts but no narrative wrapping - Recruitment screens on tools rather than impact; the radar has impact stories but they are not pulled - Each department, fending for itself, pulls individual developers into one-off conversations with no reuse The same developer conversation might happen four times for four department purposes and yield nothing reusable. The people side: cross-departmental technical narrative is nobody's job. The informal brokers - senior engineers spanning projects - are candidate stewards for any function that wants to ask the organisation a coherent question, but no role yet exists to hold that. ### Knowledge domain profiling The cluster: cross-departmental expertise as a product. Rare-to-medium creation cadence, high consequence (drives client acquisition, talent attraction, internal mentorship, agent-readiness). Consumed broadly - Marketing for content, Sales for proposals, Employer Branding for events ([[DevDuck]] meetups), Recruitment for screening signals, Engineering for internal learning, and external clients and candidates through published artefacts. The Expertise Radar is the starting input - the cluster's structural core. What is new in this layer is everything the radar does not provide: a unifying narrative, a named steward, outward channels, and capture-transform-reuse discipline. The quality bar: - **Mission alignment** - every artefact tied to a business problem the organisation solves, with a "why us" narrative attached - **Cross-department reusability** - one developer conversation yields content for at least three channels (e.g. article + short + Sales material + knowledge base entry) - **Discoverability across audiences** - the same expertise must be findable by Engineering, Marketing, Sales, EB, Recruitment, and external readers - **Agent-readiness** - structured and linkable so AI agents can pull context - **Survivability** - outlives any specific developer's tenure and survives rotation Non-negotiables: *mission alignment* and *cross-department reusability*. Without those, the producing developer becomes a Marketing-Sales-Recruitment shuttle with no ownership of the narrative. Steward candidates surfaced from the previous act: a dedicated [[Tech Evangelist]] role (individual contributor reporting directly to CEO) with cross-departmental authority and explicit shielding from any single department's pull. ### Knowledge methodology matching A productised organisational expertise function built on four moves on top of the Expertise Radar: - **A unified mission** - [[Software Delivery Excellence]] on three pillars (Continuous Delivery, Business-oriented implementation decisions, Rigorous project governance). One technical narrative every department can use. - **A named steward** - the [[Tech Evangelist]] role, individual contributor reporting to CEO, owning cross-departmental knowledge flow. Shielded from any single department's pull. - **A structural core inherited from the previous layer** - the [[Brainhub's Expertise Radar|Expertise Radar]] already links problems, tools, experts, projects, and decisions. The function reuses it as its query layer. - **A capture-transform-reuse discipline** - every artefact tied to a business problem; one input transformed into multiple output formats; reject anything that does not reuse. The method is *Expertise Radar + leadership + channels + reuse discipline*. Take any one of the four moves away and the function collapses back into either an internal-only graph or a fragmented set of department pulls. ### Tool (illustrative, after the workshop) [[Notion]] Enterprise - the same linked-database tool the Expertise Radar runs on, plus additional databases for channels (articles, shorts, [[DevDuck]] talks, podcasts, Sales materials) cross-referenced back to the underlying problem / expert / tool entries. Comfortable for non-engineers to read. Lived in the same workspace as task management (integrated via the [[PARA method]]) so knowledge and tasks referred to each other. Scaled from roughly 100 to 600 people after the [[STX Next]] acquisition without restructuring. Today the recommendation would shift toward [[Obsidian]] with AI agents for richer querying - same method, different tool.