5 Business areas that Your API Documentation Impacts
Documentation isn’t only for developers, but critically influences many other business and technical areas.
Documentation, if written effectively, structured well and maintained regularly, can serve a wider set of use cases in addition to being a resource for API developers.
Throughout our journey with designing developer tools and documentation for our customers, we have always pushed for not only more comprehensive documentation (keeping multiple audiences in mind), but also more diverse uses for the docs portal, across multiple teams, and not just restricted to the API tech teams.
When each team understands how documentation is relevant and useful to them, for internal or external purposes, this not only unlocks the true ROI and potential of the documentation, but also brings about significant business and operational impact to each of the involved teams.
Documentation for marketing and selling
Your documentation portal can serve as an extremely effective tool for both, marketing as well as selling. The portal landing page can serve very well for content marketing, branding your offerings and drawing your users’ attention to specific areas.
While the portal itself can be instrumental in driving organic traffic, well-written documentation can signal to your audience of the quality of your offerings and the fact that you care about them and value their time. This also helps build your happy customer base, and hence with word-of-mouth recommendations – which tend to have higher conversion rates.
Documentation as an internal knowledge base
Documentation should be leveraged as a store of information and a knowledge base, to be referred to, when there are questions or discussions about specific areas related to the product. Documentation can drive internal efficiencies – instead of meetings to explain how something works, a redirect to the relevant part of the documentation can save a lot of time!
Documentation for training new recruits
On the same lines, documentation can serve as a great starting point for new recruits who will be working on the same offerings – it can serve as a compendium for pre-reading, helping bring new teammates up to speed much faster and saving much hand-over time.
Documentation to lower support costs
Comprehensive, structured and easily searchable documentation can help significantly reduce the amount of support that the user may require. It is important that the information pre-empts potential issues that the user may face and contains details on how to handle these issues. This could help avert phone calls, escalations or exchanges to de-bottleneck your users.
Documentation to reduce other overheads
Well-maintained documentation helps reduce future maintenance costs – if sections of information are laid out well, and ownership / authorship is maintained clearly, future updates are more efficient, timely, and hence less costly.
