An opinionated structure

Minimum viable structure means giving a team enough rules to organize useful material without asking it to design a learning system first. In Fieldbook, those rules shape what authors create and what readers can expect.

Content has a defined job

The three formats give authors a starting decision about the material they are creating:

• Updates explain changes or share perspectives without asking readers to complete a learning activity.
• Docs give ongoing guidance a maintained home that people can return to.
• Courses organize teaching into lessons, with progress and optional knowledge checks.

Choose the format by what readers need from it. A course can teach a process while a doc holds the instructions people use afterward, and update explains the why behind the point in time change; Start here shows one example across all three formats. Keeping those jobs distinct helps authors decide what needs continued maintenance and what belongs to a particular moment.

Courses and Updates can be assigned to users, and will appear in the For You sections of their respective landing pages.

Published knowledge is shared

Everyone allowed into an installation can read its published Updates, Docs, and Courses. An installation can require sign-in or allow public browsing, but selecting an audience does not restrict who can read an individual item.

A Sales audience can receive an assigned course or a relevant update while colleagues outside Sales can still read the same material. This supports learning beyond someone's immediate responsibilities. Authors should write for their audience while keeping the installation's whole readership in mind.

Docs use two levels of sections

The Docs library has top-level sections and optional subsections. Each doc has one place in that navigation, directly in a section or in a subsection. Subsections cannot contain more subsections.

This keeps the browsing structure shallow and puts more weight on clear section names and article titles. A complex subject can still have a detailed guide, organized with headings and links, without adding more navigation levels.

Teams and learning groups serve different purposes

Reporting responsibility and shared learning needs do not always follow the same boundaries. Fieldbook represents them separately:

• Reporting teams form a hierarchy. A manager’s reporting scope covers their explicitly assigned teams and the teams beneath them.
• Learning groups are overlapping audiences that can include people and linked teams. They bring together people with shared learning needs without changing who manages them.

Both teams and learning groups can receive Course and Update assignments. For example, Sales and Customer Success can share a product training (Course) and launch brief (Update) through one learning group while retaining their separate reporting teams. Membership in that group does not grant access to other people's progress; Roles and permissions explains who can see reports.

Publishing is a deliberate step

Content edits save automatically as drafts. Readers continue to see the published copy until an author publishes the changes. A new item stays out of the reader's library until its first publication.

That separation gives authors room to revise a procedure or lesson while the existing material remains available. The organization always decides when the content is ready to publish.