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 make life easier for contributors. 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 exisitng 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!