Minimum viable docs
A focused consultancy package. Get the essential docs your users need now, and create a simple but strong foundation for your docs.
- Help people discover and onboard to your product
- Reduce basic support queries
- Lay a foundation that helps you gradually build out amazing docs:
- Contributor-friendly tooling
- Easy-to-follow style and tone guidance
- Linting, content types, and templates to support consistency and clarity
- Analytics to measure your docs
Deliverables
The following table outlines my main minimum viable docs offerings, and what they bring to your company.
You can choose whether I act exclusively as a consultant, advising and planning, or whether I also carry out the implementation steps.
The focus at every stage is to move fast and make decisions that get you your essential docs quickly, while avoiding pitfalls or future problems. By the end of the project, you'll have both the docs your users need right now, and a simple but very powerful docs setup that makes it easier for contributors to quickly create good documentation as your docs needs grow.
| Deliverable | Benefits | |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnosis | Analytics: identify needs and set up reports | Avoid gathering data for the sake of it. Know what you're gathering, design meaningful reports, and understand what to do in response to it. |
| Review of your research | A review of your existing user and competitor research, from a docs point of view. Generates docs-specific insights from your existing data. | |
| Strategy | One-page strategy | Define your objectives, and who is writing and reviewing. |
| Audience definition | Get clarity about who your audience is and what problems they're trying to solve when they visit your docs. | |
| Tactics | Content plan | Based on the audience and objectives, define a documentation content plan and information architecture. |
| Content types and templates using Diátaxis | Each page in your docs has a defined content type and structure, designed to meet the user's needs. The templates improve contributor experience and efficiency. The Diátaxis model is simple but effective. The templates are customised to your product and audience. | |
| Tooling: Material for MkDocs | Quick and simple setup, but very feature rich and actively developed. This is your first five years at least. | |
| Process design: a docs like code process that fits with your existing CI/CD practices. | Make it easy for developers to contribute, and avoid additional ops overhead. | |
| Style guide: choose an off-the-shelf popular guide and create a simplified version for ease of use. | Style guides ensure consistency (which reduces friction for users). The simplified guide means contributors don't need to wrestle with a massive book of style rules. | |
| Linting: Vale | Just like code linting: a CLI tool and IDE plugin that checks spelling, consistency, clarity. Supports your contributors to create a better reading experience. | |
| Implementation | Actually write the docs! I offer coaching to make sure your contributors are confident in continuing the project. | |
Timeline, pricing, process
The length of the project depends on which elements you choose, your availability, and how much coaching and implementation work is required. A typical range is anything from two to six weeks.
I provide a custom pricing quote for every client. This allows for the wide variation between different docs projects.
The process:
- Contact me
- We have an initial call to discuss your needs.
- I provide a statement of work, detailing deliverables, time estimate and pricing quote. I can provide a contract, or we can use your company's own legal docs.
- Once you've signed, we start the project! You'll need to grant me access to some of your company's systems and data. Usually this includes your user research, analytics, and docs repository.
- You'll review every deliverable as we go to make sure I'm on track.