Product overviews -- a tricky space where documentation and marketing overlap
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.
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About 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, agent skills, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my AI courses for more on the latest in AI and tech comm. If you're looking for info about documenting APIs, see my API documentation course.
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Finally, I want to note a couple of things. I usually write the first drafts of my posts myself and then use AI to improve accuracy, clarity, and detail in places, so my writing is a mix of human and AI. (Hopefully that's not too off-putting.) Also, the opinions I express on my blog are my own perspectives, not those of my employer.