Are your customers constantly reaching out for help? Are new team members struggling to get up to speed? If your answer is “yes”, then it strongly indicates that your team lacks proper technical documentation. In this article, we’ll dive into the essential types of technical documentation that you should look at to improve customer satisfaction, efficiency, and long-term scalability.
Why Use Technical Documentation?
Technical documentation is crucial for a smooth, efficient, and scalable SAAS product or service. It’s structured, well-organized content that provides necessary information, instruction, and guidance for a SAAS product or service. It was created to guide users, developers, or other internal team members, helping them to understand and efficiently use the SAAS product or service.
Technical documentation is essential for users and developers to use, update, and maintain an SAAS product or service.
Slow Onboarding Process
If you don’t have well-organized documentation, onboarding new team members becomes a time-consuming struggle. This makes the makes the onboarding process slower. New team members may struggle to get up to speed and rely on the other team members for answers, slowing down the entire development team.
Poor User Experience
Without proper technical documentation, your users can face difficulties in using the product and call support over and over again, causing higher support costs and customer dissatisfaction. Users can abandon the product due to confusion and lack of guidance.
Technical Debt
Technical Debt feels like a hard break situation when your team rushes to meet the deadline but is stuck in a lot of misunderstandings and additional work. It can occur when updating or maintaining the system with no clear documentation on system architecture or best practices, making it hard to maintain consistency in the coding and deployment process.
Risk of Knowledge Loss
If your product or service isn’t well documented, there could be knowledge loss when the key team members leave. Without documentation, replicating past decisions or troubleshooting issues becomes difficult, leading to repeated mistakes by the new team members.
Slower Scaling & Growth
Well-structured technical documentation makes it easier to scale operations efficiently. Without it, your team might take too much time to release new features or updates due to a lack of unclear processes. In addition, investors and stakeholders may mark poor documentation as a sign of weak internal management.
6 Types of Technical Documentation
Technical documentation comes in many forms. Among them the most common types of technical documentation are,
User guides
The most commonly used documentation type used in SAAS industries. The user guide is intended to help users by providing a brief description of the product and instructions on how to use the product, service, or application. The user guide comes with step-by-step directions to complete a task, helping the user get their desired results quickly. Considering the user with empty knowledge about the product, this document explains complex features and tasks in a simple and easily digestible language. User guide also known as instruction manual.
Includes: Product overview, feature explanations, and task-based tutorials.
Goal: Reduce customer frustration and improve user adoption.
API/SDK documentation
API/SDK is a type of technical documentation that is mostly written for developers, explaining how they can integrate the API/SDK into their application. This documentation provides a full specification of the API/SDK such as how to install or integrate, requests, response, and so on. It also includes details about the functions, classes, arguments, and return types of the API/SDK. API/SDK documentation is crucial for any developer team especially when onboarding new team members. This makes the onboarding process faster by reducing the time to explain the API/SDK to new team members.
Includes: Installation steps, request-response formats, function descriptions, and sample code.
Goal: Make API/SDK integration smooth while reducing onboarding time for new developers.
Process documentation
If you’re involved with a software developer team, you must be familiar with the Process documentation. These documents assist team members in how to work, use the SDLC model and the rules they must adhere to. Process documentation ensures the process is consistent and makes it easier for new team members to get started quickly. Coding and testing standards, meeting notes, reports, roadmaps, and backlogs are the common types of Process documentation.
Includes: Coding/testing standards, meeting notes, roadmaps, and backlog management.
Goal: Maintain efficiency, streamline collaboration, and accelerate new team member onboarding.
System documentation
System documentation acts as a blueprint that holds information about the system and acts as a reference for future system maintenance or updates. That’s why it is specially organized for developers who maintain the system. System documentation provides a brief overview of the system combining crucial topics such as product requirements, architecture, UX design, source code, QA activities, etc. The major purpose of system documentation is to bridge gaps in understanding, enabling seamless communication between team members and ensuring the long-term maintainability of the system.
Includes: System architecture, product requirements, UX design, source code documentation, and quality assurance (QA) activities.
Goal: Ensure long-term maintainability, bridge knowledge gaps, and simplify troubleshooting.
White papers
Another common type of technical documentation is the white paper, which is used to present information, analysis, and insights into a problem or solution. Software companies use this documentation to highlight the features of the system, product, or service. They also use it as a part of content marketing strategy in B2B marketing. The white paper comes with more technical and in-depth than the other types of content like case studies and blogs. There are several types of white papers available such as Backgrounder, Thought leadership, Problem-solution, and Market research.
Includes: Technical insights, market research, and product benefits.
Goal: Establish credibility, drive marketing efforts, and demonstrate industry authority.
Case studies
A case study is important documentation that describes how the SAAS product is utilized by an individual or business. It presents the challenges faced during the project implementation, project outcomes, and insights into the benefits. Case studies are popular among SAAS startups, demonstrating how their product or service streamlines its operation, improves efficiency, and increases sales. It acts as proof by providing real-world applications and validating the service or product’s effectiveness. SAAS companies can create business-specific case studies based on various properties like business size, or use cases, aligning with the requirements of possible clients.
Includes: Problem faced, solution provided, implementation details, and success metrics.
Goal: Build trust, validate product effectiveness, and attract new customers.
Final Thoughts
That’s all.
In this article, we’ve covered 6 most common and important types of technical documentation.
Poor documentation can cause inefficiencies, higher costs, customer frustration, slow onboarding, and even security risks. Creating well-structured documentation will not only prevent these issues but also create a foundation for better user experiences, smoother operations, and long-term scalability.
Tools like Dev-doc can empower your documentation process with automation and reverse engineering features, making it faster, smarter, and more efficient.
If you still have any questions or require any additional support. Feel free to contact us any time.
