Studying Time: 6 minutes
Finest-in-class product documentation is the hallmark of most customer-centric organizations. Product documentation helps customers navigate by means of your product and uncover probably the most related options and capabilities. Excessive-quality product documentation differentiates your small business from the competitors and helps you win belief. In rising corporations, documentation is a further help helpline that may scale shortly and scale 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 simple to grasp?
- Are superior matters lined within the documentation?
- Is your documentation up-to-date?
- How effectively does your documentation assist your prospects obtain their objectives with out hassles?
In case your solutions to a few of these questions are “perhaps” or “no,” you would 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 individuals throughout three time zones. Out of 2183 bugs reported, 1427 had been related. And the most effective half, the occasion was distant.
Would you want to search out out extra about our Docathon? This text discusses all the pieces you’ll must know earlier than organizing a Docathon.
The Want For Docathon
You’ll agree that efficient product documentation is important. Nevertheless, regardless of its significance, we don’t at all times allocate sufficient time and a spotlight to documentation. Enhancing documentation is an ongoing course of and might be draining when you could have restricted assets. The secret’s to comprehend that good documentation shouldn’t be the duty of 1 staff – documentation is everybody’s enterprise.
This bought us considering,
- What if everybody within the group contributed to documentation?
- May we set a number 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 recognized and others unknown. Nevertheless, we lacked the required perspective, bandwidth, and coordination to determine, prioritize, and fill them. To convey a few 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 staff hosts them usually. Moreover, we’ve got expertise in organizing improvement hackathons efficiently. Even with this prior expertise, we knew a Docathon could be difficult.
Figuring out gaps within the documentation doesn’t require particular expertise. Not like bug bashes and improvement hackathons, anybody can take part within the Docathon.
How To Put together For A Docathon
Organizing a hackathon could seem intimidating at first. Nevertheless, in the event you plan forward, it isn’t tough to schedule one.
Resolve the date and time
To arrange your bug bash, that you must choose a date first. You would possibly suppose it’s trivial, however selecting the unsuitable time and date generally is a deal-breaker. Choose a date when it’s more likely to have the best participation. Set up an inclusive occasion that permits colleagues from totally different geographies to take part remotely or in particular person. Earlier than scheduling the occasion, think about cultural sensitivities and celebrations.
Kind an organizing staff
Organizing an occasion like Docathon is a mammoth activity for a single particular person. One particular person can’t personal all the pieces with so many shifting elements. So we shaped a various organizing staff consisting of individuals from varied departments. The Docathon organizing staff had members from Documentation, Product, Engineering, Buyer Success, and Gross sales. Every organizing staff member was assigned clear obligations and roles all through the occasion. Whenever you assemble a various staff of people, you get balanced viewpoints and decrease the chance of unconscious bias in decision-making. For us, the Docathon was a superb instance of how individuals with totally different views can collaborate and obtain superb issues.
Create buzz inside the group
Pre-event advertising and marketing is important to get participation. You have to not solely make individuals conscious of your occasion, however you will need to additionally create pleasure amongst your attendees about what’s to return. A teaser marketing campaign might 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 type for registering groups two weeks earlier than the occasion to gather Members’ names, e mail addresses, and staff names.
We felt {that a} staff of 2-4 members works the most effective. 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 every other data {that a} bug report ought to include. Seize important data utilizing obligatory fields.
- Share the templates for bug reporting.
- Create a few bugs in every bug class to assist individuals perceive methods to draft an excellent bug report for the Docathon.
- Share an inventory of instruments and display recorders that the individuals can use to seize bugs.
Outline and talk the principles
There are particular guidelines in each competitors; a Docathon isn’t any expectation. You could discover some concepts by taking a look at our rule sheet.
Conduct a prep assembly
Schedule a gathering a few days earlier than the occasion. Within the preparation assembly, stroll the individuals by means of the scope of the Docathon, guidelines, bug reporting, and so forth. Handle their considerations and queries. Schedule a number of periods that align with individuals of various time zones. Don’t overlook to document the session and share it with individuals who missed attending the dialogue.
Easy methods to drive participation
Engaged on documentation doesn’t sound interesting to many people, notably engineers. An occasion like Docathon wants creativity and innovation to draw attendees.
Gamify
Gamification is the appliance of recreation considering and typical parts 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 individuals engaged and all through the occasion by gamification of various phases. Gamification will increase the extent of engagement among the many individuals.
- Create real-time Leaderboards to current aggressive placement throughout the occasion. Share statistics periodically throughout the occasion, resembling whenever you attain 100 bugs, prime three groups on leaderboards, main bug reporters, classes of bugs, and so forth.
- Present countdown timer on the wall/display.
- Be artistic together with your communication – this helps create higher viewers engagement. Right here’s an instance:
Incentivize participation
Incentives create an thrilling environment and encourage participation. Reward the individuals who uncover helpful bugs, discover useful data, or present helpful suggestions. In case you’re holding one in your workplace, you may as well present pizza, snacks, and drinks to all individuals as a token of appreciation for his or her efforts and time.
We gave out three awards for the successful groups.
- High Staff : $1,000
- 2nd Staff: $700
- third Staff: $400
We additionally introduced particular classes for people who carried out exceptionally effectively. These had been the classes and rewards:
- Worth differentiator – $100
- Competitors equalizer – $100
- Finest bug report- $100
- Consumer advocate – $100
We may excite our individuals and interact them by means of these artistic concepts. Occasion outcomes are higher when individuals have a optimistic expertise.
Conclusion
Documentation is without doubt one of the vital components prospects think about when deciding on a SaaS product. When documentation turns into an afterthought, it leaves the customers in the dead of night and prevents them from reaching their objectives. If prospects shouldn’t be in a position to entry the solutions to their questions/queries with minimal effort, they’ll discover another.
Creating the most effective 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 expertise 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.
