The Leader's Chronicle #1 📰 Documentation That Is Useful
With Benedikt Kantus - Leading In Product
Good Morning, fellow Leader 🚀
Welcome to this special edition of The Leader's Chronicles, where my goal is to share resources and ideas on a specific topic, always featuring a contribution from a guest author.
For our very first edition, I have the pleasure of introducing . He is a insightful writer on topics like Product Management, Agile, and Scrum. Benedikt publishes . If you enjoy his content, please consider liking this article and subscribing to Benedikt's work. Your support is important for us writers.
Ever heard of useful documentation? It's often called the holy grail for IT teams worldwide, yet it frequently seems forgotten. Today, Benedikt and I will share some articles highlighting why good documentation is so crucial. Now, over to Benedikt for a brief introduction:
Hi, I'm Benedikt, a long-time product manager and product lead in tech. On my Substack, I pass on my experience on building great products.
In product management just like in project management, everybody agrees that documentation is important - and then nobody writes it. However, what if I told you that documentation can help you save a lot of time?that you can work in peace while other people find exactly what they look for? That's a huge happiness boost for you and your colleagues! Please find two articles closely related on how to share team and product information.
The key points are the following:
Keep all relevant information accessible in one place.
Refer people to this place every time the answer can be found there.
Learn what people ask most and include that information in the documentation.
The same is true about your product when you move on to another position: What will people be interested in regarding the product, the organization, the team? I recommend writing a handover document early on, even if you do not yet have plans to leave. It serves as a good team documentation as well.
To get more into detail, I’d love if you read the linked articles!
Back to me!
I pay close attention to the form my team’s documentation takes. Static Word documents buried in SharePoint often become outdated almost immediately, offering little value. This is why I prefer collaborative and easily maintainable formats, like Wikis.
But what are some compelling examples of the added value that good documentation brings? One major benefit directly tackles a familiar curse of our work lives: getting calls while on leave or paid time off. Ensuring documentation is genuinely useful, something my first article explores with practical tips, is crucial for preventing these interruptions.
My second article covers the importance of documenting key team processes. It shares a story about needing both a simple checklist and supporting documentation to ensure a highly complex procedure was actually being followed correctly. Unfortunately, my boss back then wasn't keen on implementing such ‘advanced techniques’ as checklists and documents. Apparently, people aren't prone to making errors, I guess…
To conclude this edition, a big thank you to
for this collaboration! Find the link to his newsletter below.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic.
Cheers,
Benedikt & Artur
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