Why Developer Documentation Should Be Treated as Its Own Product

Developer documentation, or docs, often takes a backseat to features and functionality. Many projects need help to provide developers with necessary and up-to-date information and content. However, this isn’t the only purpose for technical documentation. It can also contribute to product success. Similar to how software products are designed, marketed and iterated upon, documentation should also be treated as a product with its own lifecycle.

This article explores the concept of documentation as a product and its benefits, developing a product mindset, metrics tracking, continuous improvement and practical steps to adopt to set up your documentation team for success.

What Does Effective Documentation Look Like? 

Effective documentation is an essential asset for any product or company. It provides a clear and accessible reference for users, developers and stakeholders. 

Comprehensive and Accurate

Documentation should address all relevant concepts about the product. Use high-level diagrams, images and code examples to convey complex ideas or concepts.

Clear onboarding

Effective documents should clearly onboard different audiences (both technical and non-technical). This is usually depicted in the information architecture flow or clear instructions for getting started in the documentation, README or landing pages. Docs with clear onboarding lead to developer and general user retention.

Accessible

Document accessibility refers to designing documents so people with disabilities can read and interact with the content as efficiently as possible. This includes people with visual, auditory, cognitive and physical disabilities. The document should provide easy-to-use search functionality, offer clear navigation menus and breadcrumbs, and function well across different devices and browsers. For general dos and don’ts, see Google’s writing accessible documentation guide.

Actionable

Effective documentation guides users through tasks step-by-step. It includes practical examples to illustrate concepts and provides mechanisms for users to provide feedback and suggestions.

Clear Business Model

Documentation should align with the product or system’s overall objectives. It should help users achieve their goals and solve problems, minimizing the need for support inquiries by providing clear and comprehensive information.

Community and Support

Effective documentation gives users valuable insights, assistance, and a sense of belonging. Provide links to social media groups and online communities like Discord, where users can connect, discuss topics and stay up-to-date. Provide an FAQ to address common questions with clear answers. Also, a centralized repository of information and resources should be created.

Regular updates

Effective documentation keeps product updates and changes up to date. This involves ongoing review, improvement and maintenance. Just as an application in production is continuously improved and iterated upon, documentation should be no different. Keeping documents in sync with product changes is not for the documentation team alone; it’s a collaboration with various teams and a combination of tools that constantly monitor and update changes. 

More on ProductThe Boring (but Necessary) First Step to Creating a Great Product

Why Documentation Should Be Treated as a Product

In the early stages of building a product, the focus is often on building a functional minimum viable product (MVP), securing funding and generating excitement. While these are essential steps, development teams sometimes overlook creating a positive first impression for users, particularly in platform-specific products whose first-line users are developers who integrate with an API or service. 

As the company matures and shifts from acquiring users to retaining and growing them, providing exceptional user experiences becomes paramount. A well-designed and accessible doc with up-to-date content and guides can significantly influence a user’s decision to become a loyal advocate.

Documentation is vital to the total product experience because it’s how users onboard, upskill and learn about a platform or tool. It doesn’t just provide a set of guided steps and instructions; it’s an integral part of the developer experience. Crafting a complete product experience for users involves several components, such as:

• Developing a product mindset
• Tracking metrics (measuring what matters)
• Continuous integration

In addition, technical writers are advocates, and many writers’ tasks and contributions are judged through the lenses of how many articles they write or publish. But this poses a challenge. Looking at the role from this lens can significantly lead to the under-utilization of the team. Adopting a docs-as-product mindset ensures that the docs team can holistically approach their roles and responsibilities and demonstrate, in a data-driven way, the impact and value of what technical writers do and how it contributes to users and business success.

Why Good Documentation Is Important

1. Improved developer productivity: Good documentation can streamline the development process by providing developers with a reliable reference point and also reduce the need for repeated explanations and answering questions.
2. Enhanced developer satisfaction: Well-designed and accessible documentation can significantly improve user satisfaction and reduce support costs. A good user experience on mobile and web means that users can find the information they need easily and quickly without reaching out to support.
3. Increased product adoption: Clear and comprehensive documentation can help developers understand and utilize the product or API, leading to higher adoption rates.
4. Stronger brand reputation: High-quality documentation contributes to a positive brand image and reputation. If your users are satisfied with the docs and find the information they need, this leads to improved brand perception, and depending on the product, it can lead to recommendations and referrals.

How to Adopt a Documentation as a Product Mindset

Technical writing or docs teams that adopt a product mindset bring significant value to their audience, often finding opportunities for growth along the way. Developer relations teams can (and should) apply this approach to every tooling, event, webinar, documentation, and community, making each interaction a chance to improve the developer experience and get feedback. Here’s how to do it: 

1. Set Clear Goals and Priorities

One easy way to know if your audience resonates with your docs is to find out what content works, what doesn’t, what to improve, or what users are interested in seeing when interacting with the documentation.

The first step should be to ensure documentation goals are tied to the company’s objectives.

Establish specific goals and targets to track the success of your team’s efforts; these can range from user satisfaction ratings to time-to-completion metrics.

Some key metrics doc teams can track:

• Time on page
• Time to completion
• Code examples copied or interacted with
• Number of search queries 
• Number of clones, downloads, or sign-ups 
• Questions or inquiries about specific content, either from the community or via the search tool
• Ratings or feedback/user satisfaction on content published
• Number of issues or pull requests were received from the community

2. Provide Detailed Onboarding 

As with every product onboarding, provide a comprehensive wiki or document highlighting the technical writer’s tasks and processes and the needed access level for documents and resources, such as links to internal help articles, for the technical writer to get started. Provide clear instructions for setting up the documentation site depending on your team’s toolchain.

3. Understand Your Audience

An essential skill for technical writers is empathizing with their audience. Be an advocate. Put yourself in the shoes of your users. What are their needs, challenges, and expectations? What is their journey? What action do they need to take based on their journeys? What content is most likely to be interacted with based on their interests?

Actively seek feedback from users to understand their experiences and identify areas for improvement. Feedback can be gathered via docs surveys or by asking developers and product teams for feedback directly.

4. Plan and Organize

Focus on creating your users’ most valuable and relevant content. Data should drive this. Use tools like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg or Hot Jar to track reader activity and touchpoints. Analyzing usage data will help to identify trends and areas for improvement.

5. Foster Collaboration

Encourage collaboration between writers, developers, product managers and other stakeholders to ensure alignment and avoid silos. Communicate the documentation process from research to publication and post-publication and ensure all stakeholders are aligned. Create an environment where ideas can be shared freely and openly.

6. Leverage Technology

Select documentation tools that support collaboration, version control and search functionality. Tools like Grammarly for spelling checker, git for version control, Jira for task management and Google Docs for collaboration are all effective resources for technical writing teams.

7. Continuously Improve

Successful products adapt to market forces, and successful product managers embrace change as part of the process. Continuous improvement for docs should involve creating a feedback loop to ensure regular doc updates and maintenance and collaboration across development teams in an agile manner, constantly evolving content and features to ensure they meet user needs by gathering feedback from users to identify areas for improvement and address pain points. Ensuring regular document updates and checks are implemented in the product lifecycle keeps the documentation fresh and always in sync with the product.

8. Measure and Analyze

Monitor key performance indicators to assess the effectiveness of your documentation based on the metrics you established in the first step.

More on Product3 Reasons Why AI Won’t Replace Product Developers

9. Promote Documentation as a Valuable Asset

Champion the importance of documentation within your organization. Encourage team members to share their work, post about it on social media, and advocate for their team.

Highlight your documentation as a valuable resource to customers and partners. Always refer your users to the documentation; this way, you can ensure that you get feedback and iterate quickly. If no one is using the documents, there’s no way to get actual feedback that will help to improve them.

Docs as Product is a culture/mindset, and ensuring the technical writers on your team adopt the product mindset will lead to general team health and success.