What Would Wes Do: a knowledge site I left behind

The problem

When I left Verizon, seven years of my work was spread across email, chat and shared documents: the decisions, the feedback, the arguments, the answers. It sat in three systems, and the person who knew where to look was leaving.

Taking a copy with me was not an option. The record a person builds up at a company belongs to that company, so whatever I made of it had to stay inside.

What I built

Before I turned in my keys, I built my team a browsable site called WWWD, short for What Would Wes Do. It sits on top of my email, chat and documents, inside the company firewall, where they already were.

The site has sections for:

• The people I worked with, with notes on how to work with each person.
• The programs I ran, rebuilt from the strategy decks, roadmaps, analyses and proposals behind them.
• The AI-assisted projects I built, with their design decisions and session logs.
• A folder of memes, for the moments when a picture landed better than words.

There's also a search box with an AI chatbot behind it and that record underneath. You can use it like a very good search: what did we do, what did we decide, where's the old deliverable. Or you can ask how I would handle something, and it answers from how I handled similar things before.

What had to be handled carefully

• Keep everything where it was. I didn't copy any of it anywhere. I built on top of it inside the firewall and left it there. When you're out, you export nothing that is even remotely business related, and I have none of it now.
• Keep sensitive people details out. When I first started analyzing my work email, I wrote down rules for people data: stay broad and general instead of specific, keep sensitive details out with hard filters, and write the privacy limits into the system.
• Let it say "not enough evidence." The same rules say the system should be careful in what it assumes about people, generous in the assumptions it does make, and comfortable saying it doesn't know.

The value

My former team can find what we did and decided, and ask how I would have handled something, without me in the room.

As far as I know, it's still live inside. Over time a lot of it will age out, and the AI access behind the search box may stop working. Much of what I gave the company, including the parts that stay relevant for years, will stay there and stay usable.