What is Tamarind?

Knowledge should compound. Not disappear.

Every day, teams generate an enormous amount of valuable knowledge through online conversations. Ideas are discussed, decisions are made, lessons are learned. Unfortunately, most of this knowledge disappears almost immediately. It dilutes among thousands of messages written every day.

Traditional chat applications optimize for communication. Documentation tools optimize for storing information. Neither optimizes for preserving the context in which knowledge naturally emerges.

Tamarind bridges this. Communication and institutional memory become the same experience.

We —developers, designers, managers, analysts, etc— spend most of the day talking. Either by chat messages or calls. Issues are explored over conversations, bugs are discussed over threads, planning are aligned over long calls. We leave a trail of information behind every time: comments, ideas, findings, decisions… This information is written or spoken, rarely documented. And when we do document things it's always a posteriori, when we can barely remember a portion of what we really discussed and executed.

We generate value, constantly. But we tend to let it disappear, decay.

I wanted to challenge this pattern by creating a new type of product. One that blends skillfully communication among colleagues with documentation traits, and leverages modern AI capabilities to make its users feel like they are not just sending messages to each other, or writing down documents, but building instead their own institutional memory. A footprint that the app remembers and surfaces to its users when they need it most. Tamarind is neither a messaging application or a documentation platform. It combines the strengths of each of them while introducing a new workflow centered around context preservation. Communication and institutional memory become part of the same experience.

Knowledge should become easier to discover, easier to understand and easier to reuse over time.

Let's use an example: "Four months ago Peter discussed with Anna a bug that was affecting their authentication pipeline on the ecommerce they work for. Anna even created a page within the same conversation to propose a solution and log her experiments and results. Yesterday, Peter opened a new conversation with Thomas. Apparently, a similar bug is happening a gain and this time Thomas is the one responsible to fix it. Peters starts describing the situation to Thomas, when a nudge appears over the conversation, visible for Peter only, mentioning that there is related information written four months ago. The notification carries along deeplinks to related messages and a page. Peter reads again those messages, goes back to the documentation written by Anna back then, and shares a summary with Thomas."

This is just an example of how Tamarind rethinks how teams remember. There are more features that I will be describing in detail in following posts. I want to narrate my journey with the product, my experiences and thinking process. Hopefully will help or motivate others like me.

Tamarind is still under development. There is already a functional build, so if you are interested in trying it, please don't hesitate in contacting me via: https://www.tamarind.so/contact