Studying Time: 6 minutes
Greatest-in-class product documentation is the hallmark of most customer-centric organizations. Product documentation helps customers navigate by your product and uncover probably the most related options and capabilities. Excessive-quality product documentation differentiates what you are promoting from the competitors and helps you win belief. In rising firms, documentation is a further help helpline that may scale shortly and cut back help prices.
If you wish to be actually customer-obsessed, ask your self:
- What sort of documentation does your product have? Is it clear, concise, and unambiguous?
- Does your product have well-written documentation? Is it correct and full?
- Is your documentation simply accessible to prospects?
- Does it observe a logical construction, and is it straightforward to know?
- Are superior subjects coated within the documentation?
- Is your documentation up-to-date?
- How nicely does your documentation assist your prospects obtain their targets with out hassles?
In case your solutions to a few of these questions are “possibly” or “no,” you could possibly host a Docathon inside your group and repair a few of these gaps within the product documentation.
We found 1400 points throughout our current Docathon at MoEngage. An intense 48-hour war-like evaluation included over 100 members throughout three time zones. Out of 2183 bugs reported, 1427 had been related. And one of the best half, the occasion was distant.
Would you want to seek out out extra about our Docathon? This text discusses every part you’ll must know earlier than organizing a Docathon.
The Want For Docathon
You’ll agree that efficient product documentation is important. Nonetheless, regardless of its significance, we don’t all the time allocate sufficient time and a spotlight to documentation. Bettering documentation is an ongoing course of and may be draining when you’ve gotten restricted sources. The secret is to appreciate that good documentation will not be the accountability of 1 workforce – documentation is everybody’s enterprise.
This bought us pondering,
- What if everybody within the group contributed to documentation?
- May we set a couple of days apart to enhance our product documentation?
In our case, we realized there may very well be a number of gaps in our documentation – some identified and others unknown. Nonetheless, we lacked the required perspective, bandwidth, and coordination to determine, prioritize, and fill them. To carry a couple of companywide coordinated effort to enhance documentation, we hosted a Docathon (a marathon to enhance documentation).
What’s A Docathon?
A Docathon is a hackathon for product documentation. A Docathon is a collaborative occasion aiming to uncover documentation gaps inside a brief interval. Merely put, Docathon is a bug bash for documentation. Bug bashes have been extremely profitable at MoEnagage, and our testing workforce hosts them often. Moreover, we’ve expertise in organizing improvement hackathons efficiently. Even with this prior expertise, we knew a Docathon can be difficult.
Figuring out gaps within the documentation doesn’t require particular abilities. Not like bug bashes and improvement hackathons, anybody can take part within the Docathon.
How To Put together For A Docathon
Organizing a hackathon might seem intimidating at first. Nonetheless, in case you plan forward, it’s not troublesome to schedule one.
Determine the date and time
To arrange your bug bash, that you must decide a date first. You may suppose it’s trivial, however selecting the mistaken time and date is usually a deal-breaker. Choose a date when it’s more likely to have the very best participation. Set up an inclusive occasion that allows colleagues from completely different geographies to take part remotely or in individual. Earlier than scheduling the occasion, contemplate cultural sensitivities and celebrations.
Kind an organizing workforce
Organizing an occasion like Docathon is a mammoth activity for a single individual. One individual can’t personal every part with so many transferring elements. So we shaped a various organizing workforce consisting of individuals from numerous departments. The Docathon organizing workforce had members from Documentation, Product, Engineering, Buyer Success, and Gross sales. Every organizing workforce member was assigned clear duties and roles all through the occasion. Once you assemble a various workforce of people, you get balanced viewpoints and reduce the chance of unconscious bias in decision-making. For us, the Docathon was a superb instance of how folks with completely different views can collaborate and obtain superb issues.
Create buzz inside the group
Pre-event advertising is important to get participation. You could not solely make folks conscious of your occasion, however you could additionally create pleasure amongst your attendees about what’s to come back. A teaser marketing campaign may be an efficient method to construct buzz. Preserve your viewers’s curiosity with snippets of content material over time. Talk successfully on the proper time and thru the suitable channels. Folks get quite a few emails, slack notifications, and assembly invites. Your communications should stand out to get their consideration.
Invite groups to take part
We launched a kind for registering groups two weeks earlier than the occasion to gather Members’ names, e-mail addresses, and workforce names.
We felt {that a} workforce of 2-4 members works one of the best. We additionally despatched registration reminders periodically and set a deadline to create a way of urgency. Encourage your leaders and documentation champions to take part within the occasion. Participation by leaders will routinely result in involvement by their groups.
Arrange a undertaking tracker
Create a JIRA undertaking to seize bugs and enhancements.
- Have customized fields to seize web page names, Bug classes, URL of the web page, or another info {that a} bug report ought to comprise. Seize important info utilizing obligatory fields.
- Share the templates for bug reporting.
- Create a few bugs in every bug class to assist members perceive draft bug report for the Docathon.
- Share a listing of instruments and display recorders that the members can use to seize bugs.
Outline and talk the foundations
There are particular guidelines in each competitors; a Docathon is not any expectation. You might discover some concepts by our rule sheet.
Conduct a prep assembly
Schedule a gathering a few days earlier than the occasion. Within the preparation assembly, stroll the members by the scope of the Docathon, guidelines, bug reporting, and so forth. Tackle their issues and queries. Schedule a number of periods that align with members of various time zones. Don’t overlook to document the session and share it with members who missed attending the dialogue.
The best way to drive participation
Engaged on documentation doesn’t sound interesting to many people, significantly engineers. An occasion like Docathon wants creativity and innovation to draw attendees.
Gamify
Gamification is the appliance of recreation pondering and typical components of the sport taking part in in non-game contexts. Gamification fosters engagement, participation, and competitiveness by turning monotonous and tedious duties into thrilling and enjoyable actions.
We stored members engaged and all through the occasion by gamification of various phases. Gamification will increase the extent of engagement among the many members.
- Create real-time Leaderboards to current aggressive placement throughout the occasion. Share statistics periodically throughout the occasion, resembling if you attain 100 bugs, high three groups on leaderboards, main bug reporters, classes of bugs, and so forth.
- Present countdown timer on the wall/display.
- Be inventive together with your communication – this helps create higher viewers engagement. Right here’s an instance:
Incentivize participation
Incentives create an thrilling ambiance and encourage participation. Reward the members who uncover useful bugs, discover useful info, or present worthwhile suggestions. In case you’re holding one in your workplace, you too can present pizza, snacks, and drinks to all members as a token of appreciation for his or her efforts and time.
We gave out three awards for the successful groups.
- High Workforce : $1,000
- 2nd Workforce: $700
- third Workforce: $400
We additionally introduced particular classes for people who carried out exceptionally nicely. These had been the classes and rewards:
- Worth differentiator – $100
- Competitors equalizer – $100
- Greatest bug report- $100
- Shopper advocate – $100
We might excite our members and interact them by these inventive concepts. Occasion outcomes are higher when members have a optimistic expertise.
Conclusion
Documentation is without doubt one of the vital elements prospects contemplate when deciding on a SaaS product. When documentation turns into an afterthought, it leaves the customers at nighttime and prevents them from attaining their targets. If prospects shouldn’t be capable of entry the solutions to their questions/queries with minimal effort, they’ll discover another.
Creating one of the best buyer expertise requires you to prioritize documentation. We at MoEngage, acknowledge the influence of product documentation on buyer satisfaction and loyalty. The documentation and product groups at MoEngage are engaged on the problems discovered throughout the Docathon to create a greater buyer expertise.
What’s stopping you from planning your first Docathon?
What’s Subsequent?
- Learn the way we innovate and use know-how to drive enterprise influence on this article.
- Interviewing with our testing groups? Right here’s a cheat sheet to crack a MoEngage interview.
- Examine MoE Hacks 2.0 – our very personal tech Hackathon right here.
