I’m one of those programmers who rarely write documentation, I even skip docstrings sometimes (honestly surprised my boss hasn’t fired me for this yet). But now that I’ve started building things on my own, I’m re-learning a lot of previously learned concepts, and I’m realizing just how important good documentation really is.
By the way, how did you come across the very first version of the Next.js docs? I actually found it super helpful, even in its early form.
"Nothing matters if users can’t use your product."
This point stuck with me the most and I can relate to cases in my personal life where some apps are just hard to use for the end user.
I think that even from taking the exercise to write docs for some of the actions would need guidance on, it could help identify gaps in the application itself and be the seed for an experiment or a metric to improve. For example, as a user, I don't like having to go through so many steps to do a common action (eg: lengthy sign up flows, finding where to view info X on the dashboard, etc). Was there a time at Posthog where you discovered a product friction from writing product docs?
Thanks for this, Ian!
I’m one of those programmers who rarely write documentation, I even skip docstrings sometimes (honestly surprised my boss hasn’t fired me for this yet). But now that I’ve started building things on my own, I’m re-learning a lot of previously learned concepts, and I’m realizing just how important good documentation really is.
By the way, how did you come across the very first version of the Next.js docs? I actually found it super helpful, even in its early form.
I'm glad you found it useful. I got the very first version of the Next.js docs from the Wayback Machine 😅 (if that is what you asking).
Great Article!
"Nothing matters if users can’t use your product."
This point stuck with me the most and I can relate to cases in my personal life where some apps are just hard to use for the end user.
I think that even from taking the exercise to write docs for some of the actions would need guidance on, it could help identify gaps in the application itself and be the seed for an experiment or a metric to improve. For example, as a user, I don't like having to go through so many steps to do a common action (eg: lengthy sign up flows, finding where to view info X on the dashboard, etc). Was there a time at Posthog where you discovered a product friction from writing product docs?
Plenty of times. I have written a lot of tutorials and ran into many times where the product didn't work as I expect, or worse, didn't work at all.
Docs team?
We have a docs team, but devs write a majority of the docs at PostHog. See: https://posthog.com/handbook/content-and-docs/docs