Scale Your Documentation, Not Your Workload
One person can write a brilliant Waybook. Keeping it current across every department is a bigger job, and a much better one shared.
Your team members are the experts in their own roles. Bringing them in early means your Waybook reflects how the work actually happens, and it moves you from being the sole writer to being the person who decides what good looks like.
Find your Knowledge Champions
You don't need everyone building. You need the two or three people your team already goes to with questions.
Design Engineers, a 70-person business, ran their rollout with a group of four who met every week. Polly Forinash, their Director of Administration, points to that group as the thing that made the difference.
Pick your champions by department, and give them at least the Author member type so they can create and edit in their own area.
đĄ Waybook Tip
Name at least two champions. One champion means the build pauses the week they're on leave - two keeps it moving all year. Your Waybook steering committee covers how to turn that group into a rhythm.
Who can do what
Waybook separates what someone can do from what they can see.
Member types
These set role-level capability:
Admin - full control, including settings and billing.
Manager - oversees content, manages users in the groups they manage, and views reports.
Author - creates and edits Subjects, Documents and Learning Paths.
Contributor - creates and edits Documents.
Reader - views and completes what's assigned to them.
Permission levels
These control access to specific content, and can be set on Subjects, Documents and Learning Paths:
Publish - full control, including taking content live.
Edit - can make changes but can't publish.
Read - view only.
No Access - hidden from everyone except Admins.
Giving your champions Edit rather than Publish is the simplest guardrail there is. They bring the expertise, you decide what goes live. Member types vs. permissions has the full breakdown.
đĄ Waybook Tip
Don't overthink this on day one. Most teams start with leadership as Admins and department heads as Managers, then refine as people get comfortable.
Give them a shape to work in
The worry with delegating is usually the same one: if other people build it, will it still hang together? Two things keep it consistent, and it's worth using them in this order.
Start with Document Types
Every document your champions create starts by choosing a type - SOP, Procedure, Policy, Resource or General - and each type carries a prompt that shapes how AI writes it.
This is the lowest-effort way to get consistent output, because it works without anyone remembering a house style. Admins can edit those prompts, or add types of their own, in Settings > AI, along with your tone of voice and language. Set it once and everyone writes the same way.
Then Internal Templates, where you need a fixed format
Some documents need to look the same every single time - a client handover, a site risk assessment, a job sheet. For those, build an Internal Template with the sections already in place.
Champions start from it via Create > Templates, so they're filling in a shape rather than inventing one.
Make it feel like yours
This one is easy to skip and worth ten minutes. A Waybook carrying your logo, your colors and your own domain reads as part of the business rather than another tool the team has been given.
That matters most for the people you're asking to build it. Champions take more care over something that looks like the company's, and readers trust it faster because it looks like everything else they use at work.
Custom branding covers your logo, colors and domain.
Your organization's dashboard is the first thing everyone sees when they log in.
Match the check to the stakes
Delegating doesn't mean losing control. Waybook gives you a full set of quality checks - the skill is using the light ones for most content and saving the formal ones for content where a mistake is expensive.
For everyday content
Submit for Review lets a champion send a document to specific people for feedback. Reviewers can edit, comment and complete the review. It doesn't block publishing, so nothing gets stuck waiting on you.
Step Revisions show you exactly what changed. Click the three dots in the top-left corner of a step, compare versions side by side, and revert if you need to. Review the changes, not the whole document.
When you publish, Waybook asks whether this is a Minor Change (published quietly, no progress reset) or a Major Change (notifies everyone required to complete it and resets their progress). The question to ask is simple: did the process change, or just the wording?
For content where a mistake costs money, safety, or a client
These four feature are available to all Waybook Pro teams:
Approval Process replaces Publish with Submit for Approval and holds the document until every stage has signed off - useful when Legal and a department head both need to see it.
Document Verification assigns one person to sign off, and revokes verification automatically whenever the document is republished.
Date Reset puts that review on a schedule, so content gets checked without anyone chasing it.
Version History compares full published versions and exports the comparison as a PDF - dated evidence for auditors or clients.
Managing it all as you grow
The Document Manager is your control center once there's real volume. Filter by owner to see who's responsible for what, track what's in draft or waiting on review, and reassign a whole set of documents in a few clicks when someone changes role.
đ Activation Challenge
Name your Knowledge Champions - two at minimum - and give them the Author member type with Edit permission on their Subjects. Then write down the documents where a mistake would cost money, safety, or a client. Those are the ones that need formal sign-off.
⨠Case Study
ContainerPort Group gave department heads ownership of their own Subjects instead of routing everything through one team. The result was a more accurate knowledge base, higher engagement, and 120+ standardized processes in six months.
Ready to build together?
The strongest Waybooks are built by the people who use them every day. Invite your first two or three experts and hand them an area each.
In Module 4: Designing the Learning Experience, your documents become the thing that trains your team.
Working through Guided Implementation? Your Account Manager will map your groups and permissions with you in a workshop.
Building it yourself and want a hand? Guided Implementation gets your team fully activated in under 60 days. Our support team can talk you through it.