Nobody sets out to hoard knowledge.
But tribal knowledge quietly turns one person into a bottleneck everyone depends on. You built the pipeline, so you know where the data lands. You wrote the transformation, so you know the edge cases. Over time, you become the person everyone pings when something looks off.
Everyone calls you the expert. What they mean is: you’re the only one who knows.
The longer that stays true, the harder it gets for anyone else to ramp up, debug, or even challenge the logic. Your knowledge becomes a gate that every question has to pass through.
I’ve been this person. It felt good until I couldn’t take a week off without my phone buzzing. The system didn’t depend on good architecture - it depended on me being available. One resignation away from a knowledge crisis.
Next time someone new joins, have them document everything they had to ask. Fresh eyes catch what insiders stopped noticing. That document is your starting point.
Who on your team would cause the most chaos if they left without a handover?