A common question I see frequently asked is, “which team is responsible for our product documentation?”. This is more than a question about the org chart—it’s actually about what priorities an organization wants to drive with their product education.
Setting priorities
Where an education team is positioned will heavily influence the type of content they produce, where it’s distributed, and how success is measured. For example, an education team could easily sit within the support, success, marketing, product, or even engineering organizations in your company.
Customer Support teams will emphasize self-service, ticket deflection, internal knowledge sharing, and cost reduction.
Customer Success organizations will likely prioritize onboarding, adoption, and continuous enablement.
Marketing teams will prioritize engagement and acquisition metrics like site traffic, bounce rates, building qualified leads, and conversion rates.
Product teams may care most about driving active product usage and in-app education opportunities like onboarding guides, tooltips, and driving traffic to learn about key features.
Engineering will care deeply about technical details, accuracy, and customer feedback.
On the other hand, for early-stage companies, docs may just be the responsibility of one person who wears many other hats.
Whatever the situation is, it’s important to acknowledge that whatever individual or team is responsible for product documentation, they’ll have competing priorities that need to be both defined and balanced against one another. Deciding which priorities (and the individuals and teams that drive them forward) are at the top of your list may help to decide who runs your documentation.
Finding the best fit
This means that, unfortunately, there’s no “right” answer for who should be responsible for product documentation. While product documentation typically lives in support, marketing, and product teams, that’s not always the best fit depending on your organization and your needs.
However, what’s constant in every situation is the importance of clearly aligning the impact of product docs to your organizational goals.
Aligning to organizational goals
Effective education strategies (which should include product documentation) have massive potential to build awareness, drive product adoption, and meet your customers needs.
To capture and celebrate that value, it’s critical to ensure that the teammates responsible for your product documentation have a clear line of sight that connects their work to your organizational goals. When that’s in place, where those teammates sit in the org chart will be less important than the impact they’re creating for your customers and your business.