Sixty minutes on the clock, a room full of cryptic clues, and no clear way out. Alex is up to the challenge. After all, they’re a developer by day, so this evening’s escape room should provide delightfully puzzling entertainment. Collecting hints from nearby objects, they’ll rearrange them into enough solutions to break out. Except Alex is not in an escape room. Alex is at their desk, struggling to figure out how a tool works using scraps of available information.

Each day, millions of engineers, developers, and other software builders like Alex awaken to issue trackers, bug reports, code reviews, and feature requests. There are plenty of problems to solve. How a dev tool, API, or development environment works should not be one of them.

Unnecessary friction is a key indicator of insufficient documentation. Sometimes, the friction comes from business actions. Often, it’s from technical inaction. If documentation gets any attention, it’s the bare minimum. At best, it describes the functionality of a tool — all about “what” it is and none of the “why” or “how.”

Robust documentation goes beyond reference docs to include use cases, tutorials, sample code, and even technical thought leadership that makes sense of where a tool sits within a developer’s workflow. In contrast to docs focused on function, robust documentation is all about context.

When Alex goes to an escape room, they collect disparate pieces of functional documentation. Connecting the dots is part of the fun.

When Alex uses a new tool, they want the pieces already collected and ideally presented in the context of the problem they want to solve. Connecting the dots is part of great documentation.

Developers like Alex deserve great documentation because there are still plenty of problems to solve without creating new ones. As we’ll see in the rest of this post, robust documentation is essential for product success, developer adoption, and even your bottom line.

The Cost of Insufficient Documentation

It’s no surprise to see developers complain about documentation. “These docs are terrible” echoes across community Discords, company Slacks, and public forums. 

Surveys consistently highlight this pain point: Postman’s API report shows 39% of developers cite inconsistent documentation as their biggest obstacle. This common frustration risks making poor documentation seem normal and unavoidable. 

But the impact goes beyond annoyed developers. It affects internal engineers, external integrators, support teams, and product managers. From wasted hours of debugging to difficulty showcasing product value, bad documentation has far-reaching and costly consequences. This broader impact demands serious attention and investment in documentation quality.

Companies whose core customers are developers have figured out the importance of developer experience (DX). While that goes beyond documentation, you can’t have great DX without a solid foundation that explains what, why, and how to implement your product.

When the customer is a developer, the value of documentation to the company is extremely clear — you’ll stop growing if developers can’t get going.

On the other hand, if you’re a software company that doesn’t require developers to integrate your tool, documentation is likely seen as one of those nice-to-have pieces of the story. But it’s boggling that so many discount the experience of their own internal team. Yes, engineering is about solving problems, but hopefully not the same ones over and over.

Yet, we’ve been having this internal DX debate for years.

In the last five years, we’ve become only more reliant on API-first development, external integrations, and entirely new toolchains for AI.

Anecdotally, the term “developer experience” has shifted from primarily external to include internal tools. There’s much more focus on automation to set up environments and use consistent approaches to produce engineering work.

Yet, documentation still does not get the attention. That means slower onboarding, difficulty understanding architecture, and a reliance on tribal knowledge. Engineering productivity company Quotient estimates every engineer costs a company $20,000 per month to ramp up. That includes the time of other team members to get them up to speed, which takes three to nine months.

Now consider that API-driven software could be used by other departments or even select external partners. This doesn’t mean a developer becomes your customer, but a developer’s success will now more efficiently get your product used.

Ineffective documentation blocks or slows down any developer who needs to integrate. And we have plenty of examples of bad documentation. From incomplete to completely inaccurate, developers often must guess and check if something works. Even when full functionality is documented, most of these facts miss basic context about why you’d use a tool in the first place. The worst documentation is the one you can’t even find — or maybe doesn’t exist.

The United States Postal Service isn’t exactly known for its technology. There are APIs with PDF downloads that provide factual references. Yet these tables of request tags require significant effort to comprehend. This is a classic “one trick pony” documentation experience. And it’s not the Pony Express.

The success of any project and how quickly it’s completed flows through to its eventual users. If your tool is internal, that could impact every engineer — and anyone needing to use the software the engineer builds. Any platform you build will further amplify the need for developer success.

We should all want to remove unnecessary friction from developers, regardless of where they work. It’s not just the right thing to do, it also saves you real costs. Friction impacts developers, their fellow engineers, support teams, product managers, and your company’s bottom line. 

What do you think? Are those big enough reasons to fix it?

The Benefits of Robust Documentation

The effects of insufficient documentation reach far beyond the developer. The good news is that the impact of robust documentation will also be felt by more than that deserving dev. 

When you invest in documentation, you aren’t just writing manuals. You’re creating a powerful toolkit of tutorials, use cases, code samples, and technical thought leadership. Robust documentation empowers developers, streamlines operations, and enables business success.

Developers may claim to only need reference docs. For public dev tools, this is a reaction to marketing that frequently misses the mark. The reality is that developers will gladly follow contextual content if it speaks to the problems they want to solve:

• Quickstarts to get a basic proof of concept working on their machine
• Tutorials that address real-world scenarios and guide developers to solutions
• Sample code for a practical starting point in common projects or boilerplate.

Devs want to implement quickly and then customize. This combination of guided learning and ready-to-use examples significantly boosts productivity. Developers spend less time deciphering how to use a product or API and more time creating valuable solutions.

Even before developers build, providing a high-level — but still technical — view of a solution is helpful. Use cases round out a developer’s understanding of a product. In the screenshot above, Twilio lays out one common reason for implementing its communication API tools. Yes, it points to tutorials, but it also connects this appointment reminder use case to the real problems that it solves.

While tutorials show how to use a tool, use cases illustrate when and why to apply it. They provide concrete examples that developers can relate to their own projects. It’s also an opportunity to explain the opinions that went into your product. These show you understand the problems and trade-offs a developer might consider in a solution. Share your knowledge to help them make informed decisions about how best to integrate or use a tool.

When your product is technical, robust documentation can help you make your case to customers. However, there are many ways it provides benefits to all software companies:

• Onboard internal engineers
  Much as developer experience has moved beyond external tools, robust documentation impacts internal teams during onboarding and beyond. In-house engineers can use clear tutorials and contextual use cases to quickly guide them into new projects.
• Communicate technical context
  Product teams can provide strategic insights that help engineers understand the bigger picture beyond code. These background details help internal engineers make better technical decisions that align with overall product goals.
• Reduce support burden
  When internal engineers get stuck, they can find someone to ask. This type of repetitive collaboration has real costs, as we discussed in the first section. Your efforts to create robust internal documentation pay off with engineers solving their own problems.
• Enable external integrators
  Partners can significantly boost your success, but supporting them can be demanding. Teams with robust technical documentation are the most prepared for these outside engineers, providing use cases and technical content to quickly support those beyond your organization.
• Prepare for public opportunities
  You may not yet be like Twilio, courting external developers, but documentation makes that future a possibility. When you want to test a platform strategy, you can quickly launch a quality technical product without playing catch-up on docs.

Great public developer companies demonstrate how top-tier docs can become a competitive advantage. By investing in documentation, you aren’t just supporting your current offering — you’re laying the groundwork for faster feature development and more strategic product decisions based on how developers actually use the product.

How to Make Your Documentation a Priority

Robust documentation drives adoption and success. It puts your technical product in the context of the problems it solves. This makes documentation a critical asset for both marketing and product teams. 

In recent years, companies have emphasized product thinking across their technical projects, especially APIs. More than half of respondents (62%) to Postman’s survey point to APIs as revenue drivers, which points to the “as-a-product” approach. When you fully embrace the needs of your technical audience, you can prioritize the right type of documentation. However, it does mean you must promote docs to a core component of your product strategy. Just as you plan for features, plan for documentation.

It’s not just about describing features; it’s about communicating value and guiding users towards success. Whether your product is internal, external, or somewhere between, you can follow these steps to shift your documentation from an afterthought to a strategic priority.

Here are six ways you can make documentation a priority:

1. Conduct a documentation audit

You can’t improve what you can’t see. If you’re like most organizations, you store documentation in various places. For example, when we review public tools documentation, we find multiple quickstarts more often than we find none. Internal docs may sprawl to even more corners. 

👉 Take stock of what you already have before trying to improve it. You’ll avoid piling on to the issue that caused multiple versions in the first place.

2. Talk to your developer audience

You can’t meet needs you don’t know about. Many companies create documentation based on product features rather than user problems. For example, you might thoroughly document every parameter of an API call but miss explaining when and why developers would want to use it in the first place. Teams frequently miss opportunities to address the questions that actually block developer progress. 

👉 You don’t need formal user research to learn from your audience. Developers will tell you what they think, but you do have to ask. You’ll build a foundation for continuous documentation improvement driven by real developer needs.

3. Allocate budget for tools and writers

You can’t expect excellence if you don’t prepare for success. Most companies treat documentation as a secondary responsibility, squeezed into the margins of already full job descriptions. For example, when a product manager is responsible for writing documentation, the task often competes with roadmap planning, customer interviews, and feature specifications. Even with the best intentions, documentation rarely receives the focus and expertise it deserves. 

👉 Intentionally allocate time and resources for documentation, even if not through full-time roles. Turn your documentation into a valuable asset rather than a neglected necessity.

4. Set clear documentation goals

You can’t call it a priority without defined targets. Documentation efforts often lack a clear purpose beyond “make the docs better.” For example, product teams may be very clear about the top three use cases, but these aren’t reflected in robust documentation. A team without focus will miss this gap, so any “improvements” won’t be of high value. 

👉 Establish specific documentation objectives so everyone can agree on your direction. In our example, you might prioritize a documentation page and a tutorial for each use case. You’ll create documentation that supports your product strategy instead of merely describing features.

5. Create a documentation style guide

You can’t scale your efforts unless you agree on patterns. Multiple authors typically create documentation with varying styles and using different terms. For example, one developer’s detailed tutorials might contrast sharply with another’s minimal instructions. Without standards, each new contribution makes your documentation more confusing to navigate. 

👉 Develop a simple style guide for terminology, formatting, code samples, and document structure that everyone can reference. You’ll create documentation that feels cohesive and professional, regardless of how many people contribute to it.

6. Measure your effectiveness

You can’t prove your documentation’s value without tracking its impact. Documentation teams frequently operate solely on assumptions about what’s working. For example, a company might believe its API documentation is comprehensive because it covers all endpoints, yet developers might still struggle to implement basic integrations. These gaps often remain hidden until they seriously impact user retention or satisfaction. 

👉 Track metrics like documentation usage, time-to-integration, feature adoption rates, and support ticket volume. These can demonstrate the tangible business impact of good documentation — and point you toward your next priorities.

If you implement even a couple of these six recommendations, you’ll have a solid foundation for making documentation a true priority in your organization.

However, one pitfall can derail even the most well-intentioned documentation efforts…

BONUS #7. Delay any documentation platform decisions

You can’t make progress if you spend valuable time debating tools. Technical teams frequently fall into the trap of believing the right platform will solve their documentation challenges. For example, we’ve seen platform deliberations become proxy wars for other organizational issues. These discussions often paralyze documentation efforts completely. 

👉 The “perfect” platform is the one you have because it means you can incorporate robust documentation immediately. You’ll deliver value to developers faster while gaining insights that will inform better platform decisions later.

What’s important to remember is that it doesn’t require a massive overhaul to make your documentation a priority. Focus your attention on these key areas — and consider objective, external guidance from a trusted partner.

Get a Docs Partner Who Knows What Developers Want

Developers deserve great documentation, and the steps to provide it are not complicated. You’ll see faster onboarding, greater developer adoption, and improved product success. Robust documentation will reshape your technical product from a set of features into solutions for real problems. 

You can accelerate your progress when you work with a partner who understands your audience. They can provide an objective assessment and a helpful ear as you prioritize your documentation initiatives. EveryDeveloper helps product and marketing teams create documentation that genuinely serves developer needs — turning your docs from a pain point into a competitive advantage. 

Our team combines developer backgrounds with strong communication chops. We’ve seen hundreds of developer portals and can help you identify high-impact improvements through our objective documentation gap process.

Ready to make your documentation a priority? Reach out to EveryDeveloper and schedule a short conversation. Your developers — and your bottom line — will thank you.