Search results

Product overviews -- a tricky space where documentation and marketing overlap

by Tom Johnson on Feb 3, 2021
categories: technical-writing api-docapi-doc-site-updates

I recently re-wrote the article about product overviews in my API docs course, giving the article much more depth and discussion. I also included a survey to gather your feedback about my viewpoints with the product overview.

Here’s the intro:

The product overview (usually the homepage of your product’s documentation) explains what you can do with the product, including the high-level business goals, the market needs or pain points it solves, who the product or other features are for, and other introductory information.

Although a seemingly simple page, the product overview can overlap into marketing domains, create redundancies with README’s, and pose challenges in connecting with a more diverse audience (both engineers and bizdev people) than the rest of your technical docs. Overall, the product overview is an area where documentation and marketing intersect in interesting ways.

Read more: API product overviews.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the tech comm, be sure to subscribe to email updates below. You can also learn more about me or contact me. Finally, note that the opinions I express on my blog are my own points of view, not that of my employer.