Here's my take on the crux of good product documentation:
When it comes to good product documentation, the key lies in understanding your audience and adapting the material to their needs. Everyone using your product is different, and it's important to acknowledge this. The best way to do this? Document in a 'dumb' way, providing comprehensive, step-by-step guides that make complex processes easy to understand and carry out. Why? Because that's exactly why they're turning to your documentation - to learn how to make the best use of what you've created for them.
And here's something I've found - it's hard to over-document. Yes, you can potentially overwhelm people with too much information, but that's where smart structuring comes in. Link out to separate, related documentation pages where necessary. This way, users who want additional context can find it, but it's not shoved in the face of those who don't need it. Make your documentation a network of interconnected pages that users can navigate according to their unique needs.
The ultimate aim? Empower your users to get the job done themselves. Ideally, they should be able to utilize your product fully without having to knock on the doors of your support team or, indeed, mine.
Sounds good, but how to make it happen? It all starts with a dedicated person or team, someone like me, who genuinely enjoys explaining, communicating, and educating. We don't want users feeling left in the dark. We want them confidently navigating our product, getting their jobs done and discovering new uses we might not even have thought of ourselves. This leads to an iterative learning process where we keep adapting and updating our documentation.
Unfortunately, documentation often doesn't get the credit it deserves within product teams. Budgets are heavily skewed towards engineering, which is, of course, crucial. However, getting people to not only use your product but to love it involves much more.
Documentation is a pivotal part of the user journey, ushering a user from mere interest to actual usage and eventually, satisfaction.
This doesn't stop at written documentation, though. Tutorial videos, educational articles, case studies - all these play a critical role too. They inspire, guide, and educate, making your product more accessible and attractive to users.
So, it's worth investing the time and resources into creating good, effective product documentation.