How to Write Documentation 📑

An extensive, 360° guide about crafting effective product, tech and company docs.

Organizing knowledge is one of my obsessions.

Today, this is a core part of my work as a writer, but even in my previous life, as a CTO, I invested a lot of energy into processes that enabled good, sustainable docs.

I have written many articles about this — but they mostly cover specific angles (e.g. design docs, or meeting docs), so I thought this was a perfect topic for the second of our guides.

In the past few weeks I've talked with a ton of tech leaders, read plenty of case studies, and reflected on my own experience about tech documentation. So here is what we will cover today:

• 🌟 Benefits of docs — these are non-trivial and crucial to understand.

• 🏆 How to write successful docs — strategies to craft useful docs and make people stick with them.

• 🏷️ Types of docs — we talk about product docs, design docs, specs, and code comments.

• 📌 Docs cheatsheet — we summarize all the advice into a few easy steps.

• 🔨 Tools — the five best tools for writing modern docs.

• 📚 Resources — additional readings and case studies to learn more.

Let’s dive in!