Hey Mr. CEO. Let’s turn the focus on Documentation

I am talking to you, who is in the initial stages of building a successful start-up. Let’s be honest. You haven’t yet initiated the talks to hire writers for your product & technology teams. Correct?

If I am right, this blog should change the direction of your focus towards product content and help you dodge some bullets in future.

We work in such a fast-paced environment that we seldom find time to sit back and analyze minor things that are resulting in major issues.

I said, you said, we said, they said….but not one person felt the need to document anything. Documenting is essential for business continuity, especially when you know your team is going to expand. It is easier to hold a briefing for a team of 10, but how do you plan to handle a situation when you have multiple teams across various geographical locations?

Depending on your product suite, you need a specialist or team of specialists, who can collaborate with your product development teams to create clear and accurate content for your product communication needs. These specialists are often called Tech Writers and they are different from marketing content writers as well as your developers.

Observe the image below. It tells a story of a typical start-up journey. On one side, the side that is visible, you build and launch a product, add more features, release more versions, expand your product suite and your company starts to grow.

However, if from the beginning you don’t invest in a technical or product writing team, your product documentation starts to lag behind.

Let us see how.

Stage 1: No Document

You have one product and your current focus is on perfecting and introducing it to the market. A UX designer designed your product and also wrote the UI copies, without the involvement of a UX writer (read more about UX Writing here). There is 1 or maybe 2 subject matter experts (SME) in the team, most likely a developer or QA. At this stage, you don’t feel the need to have any documentation done.

Stage 2: SME Documents

Once your product starts evolving and clients share their feedback, you feel the need to enhance and add new features. You expand your team and to train them, you need training documents. So you call your favourite SME to prepare documents that explain what went behind the scenes and how to operate the screens (That rhymed!). Unwillingly, they agree.

However, the documents that the SME prepares are too technical, too much to the point, have jargon, and not exactly user-friendly. Also, a few months later, the SME quits. Ouch! You look around for the next best option, but there are knowledge gaps that others can’t fill.

Stage 3: Inconsistencies

You reach the stage where you have multiple products under your product suite. You want to raise the bar with a higher sales target and greater service support, which is perfect. So the sales and support team expands and you personally take few training sessions. Then, you hand over the “SME Documents” for further reading.

While it is ok to train new developers with these documents, I can assure you, most of your non-technical staff will not approve of it. They will have doubts and sometimes may stay clueless for a long time.

So what will our training, sales and support teams finally do? They will invest their precious time in figuring out things on their own and make their own individual set of documents. Now you have different sets of product documents scattered across the organization, with inconsistencies.

Stage 4: Realization

By the time your start-up reaches that stage where you have multiple evolved products, you might even consider acquiring other start-ups or maybe join hands with another big firm. There are features going live, new products are being launched, everyone is discussing the great things it can do, but in one corner the training team is yet to receive all the information they need to update their training modules.

The sales team, on the other hand, has to meet targets and support teams have to be prepared for escalations, while they are all still pretty much in the dark. The communication gap is clearly getting wider and you acknowledge the need to have a dedicated resource for product documentation.

Stage 5: Hires a Tech Writer

You hire one technical writer while your company continues to grow and your product suite expands. You have back-to-back newer versions. The writer takes about 2–3 months to settle down and get a hang of all your products before they start writing.

You finally see the communication gap narrowing with quality documents in the right format, which are accurate, verified and are easier to understand for ‘everyone’. Now that people see the difference a tech writer brings to the table and their role is recognized, more work and projects start coming their way. Too much to do with tight deadlines and one single soul to write it all.

SOS! Over Workload Alert!!

Stage 6: Tech Writer Quits

Burn out is a real thing and happens to the best of us. Now that your tech writer has left, you are left with unfinished documents that will soon turn out to be redundant. Back to where you started.

When I began writing this blog, I was going to elaborate on the point -“why you must have a team of product writers”. Instead, I felt it was important to first show you a trailer of the prequel -“What could go wrong when you don’t have one”. I know that a business will not stop functioning if a writer quits. But in a fast-paced world, you don’t want to be left behind.

Having someone who is completely focused on product and technology content, can bring in a significant difference in how the rest of the teams function. It is like greasing a machine or going on to the 5th gear for some speed. It is also important to bring in a professional product writer on board during the initial stages itself. And like one developer cannot build all your products, a single writer cannot create quality documents and impactful content for all your products.