Creating Effective Product Documentation
Effective product documentation is essential for aligning stakeholders, ensuring clarity, and supporting customers with accurate information.
In this post, I’ll dive into specific recommendations to create effective product documentation - one that is clear, actionable, and tailored to stakeholder needs.
Note that this post assumes you do not have a technical writer who would otherwise be responsible for creating product documentation based on your input, vision, and goals.
Table of Contents
Defining the Purpose of Your Documentation
Keep the Audience in Mind
Tactical Considerations
Documentation Placement
Structuring Your Documents for Ease of Reading
Additional Considerations
Conclusion
Defining the Purpose of Your Documentation
Start with the end in mind - your documentation serves a clear purpose, which is to align all stakeholders on the purpose of the product and features.
Each stakeholder supports customers to achieve specific outcomes using your product. As a product manager, you should enable stakeholders to be successful in their roles when it comes to having the right information about the product so that they can support the customers successfully.
Keep the Audience in Mind
When creating product documentation, consider the specific needs of each stakeholder.
Let’s look at it from the point of view of some common stakeholders: what their goals are when using product documentation, and some things to include and exclude to keep the documentation effective.
As shown in the table above, stakeholders support customers based on their roles and rely on documentation to achieve their objectives.
For example, customer success teams manage accounts and help customers achieve their desired outcomes using the product. While their responsibilities extend beyond the product manager’s scope of support, the product manager plays a critical role in enabling their success. By providing clear and relevant information, product managers can equip customer success teams with the knowledge they need to effectively support customers.
It is essential to deliver the right information without overwhelming stakeholders with excessive technical details. Well-structured, concise documentation ensures stakeholders can assist customers efficiently and improve overall product adoption.
Tactical Considerations
Documentation Placement
When it comes to the actual placement of documentation, consider using centralized repositories like Confluence, Notion, or a dedicated help center, in consideration with your product teams’ needs and processes. It needs to be accessible to the relevant stakeholders.
Structuring Your Documents for Ease of Reading
Visualize Workflows with Diagrams
When possible, use diagrams to show workflows to avoid long walls of text.
Use Tables for Structured Information
Tables are an easy way to show structured information without throwing walls of text at readers. Consider using tables for some use cases as below:
Feature comparisons (product versus competitor features)
Pricing
SWOT Analyses
FAQs
Guidelines
What is supported versus not supported
As an example, I used a table for information because information about stakeholder groups, their goals, and key information to include/exclude could be classified in a table for ease of reading.
Consider Adding an FAQ Section
If you get repeated questions from stakeholders, I recommend creating an FAQ section that covers those as a separate section.
Additional Considerations
Review Draft Documents with Stakeholders for Their Input
After creating the first draft of the documentation, consider setting up meetings with the relevant stakeholders to get their feedback. Make updates to the documentation for clarity based on feedback, and include additional information based on the questions that were asked during your meetings, and re-circulate the documents.
Socialize Documents
I also recommend socializing these documents regularly and keeping them up to date to avoid confusion.
Conclusion
Effective product documentation is a living artifact that serves multiple stakeholders. By ensuring documentation answers key questions, we set up stakeholders for success, help customers and internal teams without overwhelming them, and ultimately lead to product success.