Documentation kickoff meetings and product demos
At some point after receiving a new documentation project, the first step in the project is to hold a documentation kickoff meeting and product demo. These meetings are mostly about gathering information so you can create the documentation. The following are some initial questions and topics for these meetings.
- Meeting agendas
- Project overview
- Product overview
- Tasks Overview
- Reference docs
- Best practices
- Error messages and handling
- Testing
- Sample app
- Release notes
Meeting agendas
The general purpose of this documentation kickoff meeting is to review the intake ticket, which should include a host of detail about the project. (See Create project plans for the documentation projects in Managing documentation projects for a list of fields.) Chances are, a product manager has completed half or fewer of the intake fields, as they just don’t know all the possible information. No worries, though, as you’ll be going through this information in more detail here.
After reviewing the ticket, you want to go over the product or features that you’ll be documenting. If this is a large project, you might have a separate meeting for the product demo. If it’s smaller, you can combine them. Obviously, adjust the advice here for the nature of the product, product teams, and company. During the demo, consider the following questions as a way to gather more information about the product or feature.
Project overview
First, get some basic information. At a high-level, what’s the project here? What’s the scope? Complexity? Timelines? Is it a new product, or are you just adding a feature to an existing product? What doc set are you modifying? What team will you be working with? Is this external or internal documentation? What format will the documentation be in, and how will you deliver it?
Product overview
After gathering some high-level project details, dive into more detail about the product.
Product overview
- What does this product do?
- What problem does it solve?
- Is this an API? Is there reference documentation?
Use cases
- When would you use this?
- Larger picture scenario?
- Common use cases?
Target users
- Who are the intended users?
- How do you know they actually want this feature?
- Do you have any voice-of-the-developer type feedback from users about this feature?
- What roles do users have? Are they engineers? What type of engineers are they?
- What’s the user’s technical level?
- Are users familiar with certain programming languages or systems?
Technical prerequisites
- What do you need to install or set up before you can run this product?
- Do you assume they already have an app? Is there a starter app or toolkit?
- Are there any required permission groups?
- Are there language prerequisites (e.g., familiarity with Android)? What language is this? For example, is this for Java apps? Is this an agnostic REST API? Are there SDKs for any specific languages?
- Are there device prerequisites? 32-bit? 64-bit? Mac/PC/Linux? Android/iOS?
Background knowledge prerequisites
- What do you expect the user to know? For example, do you assume proficiency with any systems or frameworks? What framework? What specific areas?
- Do you assume they understand any existing tools or processes?
Development effort
- How long do you anticipate that the implementation will be?
- From a developer’s perspective, what’s the scope and complexity of the integration?
- How hard is this going to be for devs? On a scale of 1 to 10, what’s the difficulty level here? And how do you know?
Components involved
- What are all the components involved in this situation?
- What are the relationships between each of the components?
- How do each of the components influence each other? What actions exist between the components?
Tasks Overview
- What’s the larger workflow of how to use the various classes in an end-to-end workflow (initialization, termination, etc.)
- What is the overall user journey here?
- What are the main tasks or core functions (e.g., classes) people will be using?
- What fields, methods, and returns does each class have?
Setup and initialization tasks
- Do you have to declare certain permissions or initialize something, or add a library to your project?
- Do you need to declare dependencies? Does the project include dependencies? How are they retrieved?
- Does the user need to request permissions? What does a manifest look like for the project?
- Is there an initialization process?
Sample usage
- Can you show the usage for one API call so that users can extrapolate how to work with other APIs?
- Can you talk through a code sample of how it works – e.g., a representative example from the API?
- Are there constructors to initialize a class or other ways to initiate processes?
Common tasks
- What are some common tasks users would perform?
- Can you provide a walkthrough of some common tasks in an end-to-end way?
Reference docs
