Documentation Ensures Product Success

A software development product’s sales pitch and feature set may attract interested developers to your site, but to ensure that they convert to users you will need good documentation 📄.

Technical stake holders are more willing to invest in products that their teams can get up and running with quickly, and that let them solve any problems they encounter themselves.

Key to this is thorough, well organised documentation that is:

✅ Clear & Targeted: Know who you are writing for and speak to them at their level. Avoid jargon unless you are confident your target audience will understand it. Include detail and avoid ambiguous language.

✅ Navigable: Users need to be able to find what they need without frustration. Fancy accordion widgets in your documentation may look nice, but they break browser search functions and make it hard for developers to find what they are looking for. Keep the layout simple and the information well organized.

✅ Practical: Provide (working!) code examples so that users can see the solution in action. Mention common errors or pitfalls users fall into and how to troubleshoot them.

Technical documentation should be buttressed with clear tutorials that demonstrate common use cases and solutions for industry-specific problems. This will enable developers to adopt your product confident that it satisfies their requirements and fast-tracks its adoption into their tech stack.

If it comes down to a developer choosing between two similar solutions, the best documented one will always win.