It’s important to make it as easy as possible for customers and anyone else reading your documentation to provide feedback. Friction can hinder motion and cause processes to require more energy. Sure, you can’t polish a gem without it, but you rarely need it in your business processes. Recently I…

Sometimes we forget how complex a process standing up a new Documentation site can be. (Skip the history? Head down to “Be Persuasive”, below.) “Still broken?” “Still broken.” It was our very last idea, our final try, Hail-Mary pass attempt to fix the completely broken site search on the hours-old…

You may hear people talk about a (somewhat) recent approach to documentation called Docs as Code. In a Docs as Code (DaC) setup, you treat the documentation just as you would treat product source code: you (typically) use Git/GitHub to store and manage the code. For the rest of the…

There are over 1.5 billion Gmail accounts (https://www.statista.com/statistics/432390/active-gmail-users/). That’s like twice as many iPhones in use in the world. With that many people creating account names, there are bound to be some near collisions. So it shouldn’t be surprising that, over the years, I’ve been getting more and more email…

So, you joined a startup (or somehow inherited the Documentation function at your place of work). You realize that professional, consistent, high-quality documentation can be a significant part of making your customers successful, so you sit down to build the department. What kinds of procedures do you need? What kinds…

First things first, yeah, I know that using Slack is hardly a revolutionary idea. It’s been around long enough that just about everyone uses it. I just want share how our documentation team uses it. We have a channel, available to everyone in the company: #documentation This is the documentation…

(This is, basically, a continuation of my first article on Startups and Documentation. You don’t need to read that one first, but I think it’s a great place to start.) So you’re going to hire your first writer! …