Best Practices for New Product Docs

A lot of technical writing work is devoted to updating, expanding, and improving existing documentation. But the challenges are very different when a product doesn't have any customer-facing documentation at all. Let's break down the problems and share strategies to tackle them.

• How do you learn what the product does if there's no docs yet? Worse, if there's no product yet?
• How do a company's priorities and focus differ between new and established products? How does that affect your documentation strategy?
• What can you do to support the product development process? What is the technical writer's role?
• How can you identify stakeholders who will support your involvement in product design decisions? How can you win more allies?
• How do you plan a big documentation project from the ground up?
• What does that plan look like if you don't have enough writing resources to cover everything on the first release? How do you set priorities?
• What's top of your mind when you have the responsibility and opportunity to design a documentation set's structure from the ground up? How do you go about making decisions about information architecture?
• Have you ever used "stop-gap" documentation solutions when you haven't had the bandwidth to create full documentation for a new product? If so, how effective were they?

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