A network runs on a hundred small decisions per week — a buyer's cap adjustment, a publisher pixel change, a payout override, a routing exception. In most operations, these decisions live in Slack threads and someone's head.
The moment that person is out for two days, the operation slows down. The moment they leave, it degrades. This is the cost of tribal knowledge, and it never shows up in a P&L until it is too late.
Documented ownership is the antidote. Every operated surface has a named owner, an SOP with a review cadence, and a change log. The knowledge belongs to the organization, not the person.
None of this is glamorous. But it is the difference between a business that survives its own success and one that gets stuck the size of one person's memory.