The Product Manager’s Documentation Checklist

Shipping Software? Avoid These 5 Mistakes That Lead To Overwhelmed Support Teams, Canceled Customer Contracts, and Users Becoming Brand Ambassadors For Your Competitor (Even If You Don’t Have A Writer Team And Your Developers Write The Docs)

Revamp your product documentation.

My name is Ben Klein. I’m an author, technical writer, and editor, and I’ve spent the last 9 years documenting software projects large and small. In this email course, I’ll show you:

  • How to organize your documentation to save time for your team, internal users, and customers

  • How your product docs can build customer trust and preempt support tickets

  • How documentation fits into creating an excellent product experience

This free 5-day email course gives you everything you need to move from depressingly cluttered, confusing, or stale docs to documentation that delights.

Want to make sure this free email course is “worth it” before you sign-up?

Here's everything that's inside:

Mistake #1: Treating documentation as an afterthought. When your real-world end users learn that when they need help, they can't find what they need in the documentation, and they start to resent the company and wish they didn't have to use your product.Mistake #2: Failing to define the documentation's audience. Your information architecture is all over the place, so your team and customers struggle to find content that applies to their role or use case and lose time searching for information.Mistake #3: Letting documentation fall out of date. When users discover release notes, screenshots, or procedures that aren't accurate (the bare minimum for product documentation), they come to distrust the documentation as a whole and prefer to open support tickets.Mistake #4: Lacking a clear and useful entry point. Potential customers can't figure out what your product is, whether it addresses their needs, or how to get started with the demo project, and they give up before giving your product a try.Mistake #5: Siloing documentation from product and development. As development and product teams plan, design, and build while being walled off from the writers, the writing team loses critical context, and the documentation starts to describe a different product.

Hooray! The first lesson of The Product Manager’s Documentation Checklist is on its way to your inbox.

Within the next minute or two, you’ll get an email from me (Ben Klein).This email describes what we’re going to cover over the next 5 days.If you have any questions, hit Reply and let me know—I’m happy to help. :-)Check your inbox tomorrow for the first email!

(If you don’t find an email from me in your inbox within the next couple of minutes, please check your Spam or Junk folder.)