Product Documentation

Why did we undertake this initiative?

There was a feedback that we kept getting from both trial customers and current customers alike. "Where can I find information on how to do or use ________ feature". I heard this so frequently. Our documentation was so scattered and sparce that even new employees couldn't understand how to get started with Autify. When I asked what we were doing about it, no one in the company had answers. Everyone said that we would get to it eventually. That was not good enough for me. I took the initiative to get that help center off the ground. 

What did I do to complete this initiative?

This was a huge project. Here's what I did - 

1) I figured out through our feedback of both trial customers and current customers that this was the single biggest point of pain for clients.

2) I went and researched a number of different documentation companies. I wanted something that I could write documentation fast in markdown and needed minimal CSS/HTML coding (I can do that but it's more cumbersome). I settled on document360. 
3) I negotiated with document360 representatives to let me use document360 trial version without payment for 3 months to get a working model of a documentation center going. I needed to prove that this would work to my company. 
4) I then wrote out the first iteration of the Autify Help Center. It's first iteration was to take a new user through our entire system and explain how to use Autify's tool. 

5) Once I was happy with the MVP, I presented it to my CEO and asked if we could use it. I had a lot of ideas on what to add but I needed to get budget approval as document360 was not cheap. I got sign off and presented it to the entire company at an all hands meeting. 

6) After the presentation, it was clear to me that I could not continue to write and maintain the documentation center on my own. Instead, I led a cross functional team of product, sales, marketing and customer success/support to implement the process for documentation submittals and reviews. The general gists of the process was support members would write the documentation (or in rare cases for really technical documents, product would write them) and then submit for review to Product and Engineering. Slack notifications would alert when new documentation or changes to existing documentation needed review. We needed 2 people to sign off on the review. Once reviewed, the documents would be published. 

7) I oversaw the process was being followed for a year before handing it off and reviewed many of the documents you see in the help center today.