3 posts tagged with "Docs Strategy"

Your documentation now has a second audience. Besides the customers and support agents who read it, there are support bots, in-product assistants, AI search engines and your customers' own AI tools, all pulling passages out of your docs and presenting them as answers. These readers do not browse your navigation, do not notice that a page is three releases old and do not know that two pages contradict each other. Whether they give good answers depends far less on which AI product you buy than on decisions about your content that most teams have not made yet.

In many SaaS companies, documentation is a checkbox on the release ticket: "Update docs". Someone ticks it the day before launch, or the day after, or never. The docs are treated as a deliverable that comes after the real work, rather than as part of the product customers use. The cost of that shows up everywhere except in the docs budget: in support queues, in sales engineering time, in onboarding calls and, more recently, in support bots that confidently repeat whatever the docs got wrong.

Documentation lock-in is almost never visible when you sign up. The editor is pleasant, the hosting is included, search works. You find out what lock-in costs on the day you try to leave: when the export turns out to be a folder of HTML with vendor markup, the URLs belong to someone else's domain, and three years of review history stays behind. The subscription fee is what you pay to stay. The exit cost is what you pay to go, and it is the number worth knowing before you need it.