Delegation of authority documents, approval matrices, budget ownership records, performance review responsibilities, and decisions recorded in ordinary correspondence. Meeting minutes where the role set a direction that others implemented are useful, as are hiring approvals for staff who report elsewhere administratively.
Collect decisions, not descriptions
Look for the moment a choice was made and communicated: the message approving a headcount, the note setting a regional priority, the sign-off on a plan. A dozen such records over a year say more than a polished job description. Where the organization keeps decisions in chat tools or ticketing systems, extract them early, since retention policies and departing colleagues make retrieval harder over time.
Add one retrieval discipline that matters more in a matrix than anywhere else: get the material out of the systems it lives in before those systems change. Decisions in a distributed organisation are recorded in chat threads, ticket comments, approval workflows and shared documents, all of which have retention policies, migrations and access rules that nobody consults until something is missing. Export the relevant records early, with their timestamps and participants intact, and store them somewhere the case can still reach in a year.
Hypothetical example: a modular housing manufacturer's regional director relies on approval decisions recorded in a project tool that the business replaces nine months later, and the records survive only because someone exported them in the first fortnight rather than assuming a system in daily use would still be there.