Capture what someone knows before they leave

The fastest handover interview is one that skips everything you already know. Kite reads its knowledge base before it asks anything, so it can tell the difference between a subject that's well covered and one that's thin.

Say your paid ads contractor is leaving. Kite might find that your brand voice and ideal customer profile are well documented. It might also find that its notes on paid campaigns hold only two results from the spring, and that nothing records which agency set up your Google Ads account or why. Those thin spots become the agenda for the interview.

This changes the conversation with the person leaving. Instead of an open-ended "write down everything you know," they get a short list of specific questions about their own work. Those questions are easier to answer well, even in a busy last week.

Kite interviews the departing person directly in a conversation, the same way you'd talk to Kite yourself. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. Kite's pricing is per workspace, so adding a contractor or agency contact to your Kite team for the handover doesn't change what you pay.

Kite asks one subject at a time and follows up when an answer is vague. The questions focus on what someone else couldn't work out from the files:

• Which campaigns, channels, or messages did you try that didn't work, and why do you think they failed?
• Which decisions would you make differently, and which ones should the next person keep?
• Who do you rely on, inside or outside the company, and what is each person good for?
• What's in flight right now, and what has been promised to someone?
• Which accounts, tools, or settings have only you touched?
• What happens every month or quarter that nobody else would remember to do?
• What do you wish someone had told you when you started?

Here's an example. You ask about the newsletter, and the person says "open rates dropped, so we moved the send day." Kite then asks what the old day was, what the new day is, how big the drop was, and whether the change helped. A short answer like that becomes a learning the next person can act on.

A lot of what someone knows is already written down somewhere, just not anywhere central. Kite reads the documents the person points it to and pulls out the conclusions.

If their campaign plans, briefs, and post-mortems live in Google Drive, Google Docs, or Notion, connect that account and Kite can find and read them. You can also share PDFs with Kite directly in the conversation. In Slack, Kite reads files people share with it, and when someone asks, it searches the public channels it has joined to find earlier conversations. That's often where the best explanations are, because people explain their reasoning to colleagues in threads far more often than they write it into documents.

Kite doesn't copy these documents into its knowledge base. It records what they concluded, such as "the Q2 webinar series brought in 40 demo requests, mostly from existing newsletter subscribers," and notes where it found it. Then it uses the interview to confirm anything that's unclear or out of date.

Kite files each piece of knowledge on the page that will be read when that subject comes up again. That placement is what makes the knowledge useful after the person leaves.

Different kinds of knowledge go to different places:

• What worked and what didn't goes into the notes for that channel, such as paid ads, email, social, or content. When Kite later plans a paid campaign, it reads the paid ads notes first and sees that the LinkedIn campaign to HR managers failed three times.
• Decisions and their reasons go into a log of decisions, each with the date, who approved it, and the evidence behind it.
• People get their own pages. A page might cover the colleague who wants to see creative before launch, the reporter who covers your industry, or the client contact who approves budgets. Each page records what the person owns and how they like to work. Contact details that already live in your CRM stay there.
• Where your data lives goes onto the page that records which tool holds which data, such as your CRM, analytics, email platform, and website. Kite marks each entry as unverified until it has checked the tool itself.
• Open questions and risks go onto their own pages, so a question nobody could answer doesn't get lost.

The person leaving may also have told Kite standing preferences, like "never post on Fridays" or "always use the long form of the product name." Each preference is saved under the name of the person who stated it. Kite can list everything that person set, so the team can decide which preferences to keep before they go.

At any point, Kite can tell you what the record now covers and what still lives only in the departing person's head. That's the most useful thing to know in someone's final week, because it tells you where to spend the time you have left.

You might see that the paid ads notes are now complete but nobody has explained the affiliate deals, or that two client relationships still have no named contact. Kite also lists the accounts and tools the person said only they manage, so you can move ownership to someone who's staying while the person can still help.

You can open the knowledge base in the Kite web app at any point to read what Kite recorded. You and the departing person can edit its pages directly, and Kite treats edits from your team as more reliable than its own notes.

The handover isn't finished until someone uses it. Kite reads the same knowledge base before every task, so if Kite takes over part of the departing person's work, it starts with everything they told it.

When you hire a replacement, Kite can write an onboarding brief for them from what the team knows. The brief covers the decisions they're inheriting, the experiments already run, the people to meet, and the open questions waiting for them. Kite can save it as a Google Doc or a Notion page if your team keeps its documents there. The new hire doesn't have to dig through a folder of old files, and they can ask Kite follow-up questions in the conversation.