Maintain: Documentation Without Losing Your Mind

The funny thing about maintenance and sustainability of your documentation is that they constitute a process that basically runs throughout the entire life cycle. It may be very formal. On the other hand, some things happen even without creating a ticket.

As a writer, wouldn’t you fix a typo that you spot on an unrelated page that you’re linking to? Or perhaps split a paragraph into a bullet list? As an information architect, wouldn’t you take the opportunity to refactor a documentation section while updating a substantial portion of articles?

Of all phases of the documentation life cycle, Maintenance is the one that gels it all together. Consider the following. The Sustain & Maintain phase:

• takes cues from the Engage portion of the Publishing & Engage phase,

• blends seamlessly into Planning,

• is executed in the Authoring (writing) phase,

• (optionally) reacts to deeper issues discovered during the Review phase.

It’s here where you analyze data, drill into the findings, play with content reporting tools to find, for example, which pages are subject to mandatory compliance reviews. It’s here where you decide to create a new variant for your conditional content and add new labels or tags.

To keep your knowledge reliable and relevant, you need to maintain documentation as part of your ongoing work. The insights you gather here feed directly into planning what comes next. That’s how great documentation stays alive.

And yet, this part of the process is often the most overlooked. Which is why this introduction was really long – first and foremost, documentation maintenance and sustainability is about your mindset 😉

Why It’s Essential To Maintain Documentation

Your readers need knowledge, wherever and whatever they are . You need to treat documentation management as more than just writing – an article is unlikely to stay relevant forever (unless you document mainframe software where articles written in the 1980s may still be perfectly relevant today). But your onboarding guide will have a much shorter shelf life. Your readers, when they open a page, should always see content that matches the actual state of your product or your internal procurement policy.

You’ve probably seen what happens when content goes stale: outdated steps, broken links, conflicting versions, confused teammates, customers filing support tickets…

Sources of Maintenance Triggers

Maintenance work needs planning – both in itself and in the context of regular development work (product documentation) or planned/expected changes to, for example, your expenses policy guides.

You need to learn to juggle planned maintenance, feedback-sourced tasks, examine their value, and align them with long-term plans.

The variety of feedback sources emphasizes the need for a unified infrastructure that ensures that information converges into a single environment where it can be reviewed, processed, and acted upon transparently and in the context of existing information.

Sources

Frankly, it would be easier to list things that cannot trigger documentation improvements, but stick with us 🙂

• Continuous improvement
  Your own urge to make the docs better, your writers' constant stride to improve things. It’s what professionals do.

• Feedback
  It comes from all directions:

  • Customers

  • Support

  • Marketing / Sales

  • Customer Success

  • etc.

• Planned updates
  New developments, updates, deprecations. Typically, such events are planned by Product teams or departments such as HR, Finance, or Legal.

Impact

When evaluating, consider the following factors and their potential impact. Not all feedback is relevant or actionable. Some may clash with your policies (for example “do not document third-party tools”), go against best practices, or you realize that the feedback is a really good idea but will require some time to implement…

• Urgency
  Critical vs can wait

• Value (quality of life)
  Dramatic improvement vs nice to have

• Who is the customer
  Updating documentation for a high-value and/or high-risk-of-churn customer is a goodwill gesture.

• Dependencies
  You wanted to clean up and reorganize that old onboarding guide, but your HR team is migrating to a new tool and it will impact content of the onboarding guide. It makes sense to postpone the cleanup; any feedback that requires substantial work should merge all tasks into a single effort.

Source and impact intersections

Sustainable maintenance is a two-way street. Sources of feedback will be impacted by the actionable maintenance. There are many stages, levels, hurdles here, but here are the main ones to consider:

Marketing copy and product research

Technical evaluators from your prospects will be involved in selecting your product or service, or they’ll help introduce new features to their team. They’ll search for knowledge all over the internet, from different sources, and in different formats. Well-maintained documentation signals better self-service, fewer tickets filed, etc. Your own marketing team may link to a reliable resource and take cues for their own marketing material.

Internal training

Most people’s first introduction to how your product or service works is part of their job training. Those responsible for training will rely on useful resources they’ve found online as well as internal knowledge.

In-app help

People will rely on in-app help to learn or find answers as they go along. Whether AI-driven, simple text bubbles, or links to your documentation pages, ensure that in-app help evolves along with your documentation site.

Help center site

The ultimate source of product knowledge that people will almost always reference from a search engine, and not by going to the home page of the help center. While this is the be-all, end-all of know-how, it might be some users’ last choice, since it can be viewed as too complicated.

AI

Increasingly, people will use their artificial intelligence (AI) model of choice to simply ask for the information they need. In this case, where the knowledge comes from is irrelevant. What matters is that it’s accurate. Enough incorrect answers and people will not use an AI solution or your product.

Support ticket

Perhaps the most frustrating way to find knowledge or get help, opening support tickets and waiting for knowledge to find its way back can be a real slowdown for people.

Your Friendly Findable Help Content

Let’s say you’ve got a beautiful help center full of your valuable knowledge.

Enhancing searchability

People in need of an answer about your product no longer access documentation by navigating to the home page and searching there. Instead, most of them go to their search engine and/or AI agent and ask a question. This is why it’s important to optimize your content for searchability.

There are many parts of the documentation process where you can make good choices to help with this (SEO best practices, style consistency, etc.), but until your content is out in the wild, wild world, you won’t truly know how people are searching for it. By reviewing search metrics from your documentation site and using tools like Google’s Search Console, you can see the types of things users search for when actually looking for your helpful content. Browsing through people’s searches can help draw out.

Terminology that your target audience uses

You might have referred to something as a page, but people are searching for the word document. If possible, try to work this popular terminology into your documentation: “Your main working area is a page, it’s similar to Microsoft Word or a Google document.”

Use-cases that you haven’t specifically documented

When you’re writing documentation about specific use cases, as you walk people through the feature, discuss both the problems and the solutions. See, some people search by problems, some by what they want to accomplish. This way, you cover functionality, symptoms, and solutions.

Questions about questions

Unknown unknowns. Sometimes people don’t know enough to be able to ask the question they actually want to ask. Ensure your pages include keywords from early on in people’s exploration to try and capture them early in their journey.

Improving Structure and Discoverability

Eventually, a user will land on your documentation site. Three good things might happen next:

• A user finds what they are looking for and leaves

• A user finds what they are looking for, is intrigued, and wants to learn more

• A user does not find the exact answer but wants to explore more to find it

In Authoring , we talked about Content the King and Context the Emperor . The structure of each doc set, each documentation/help center, is crucial both for navigation and for the users' understanding of your product.

In the second and third scenarios in the list above, the user’s attention is triggered by the context – I’m close to finding what I want, This looks interesting, I didn’t know that!, etc.

Your documentation may be the result of a carefully constructed architecture and meticulous planning, but it is subject to improvement – due to feedback, data, and even a good-old-fashioned feel. As your product evolves, so should your documentation. And if the structure does not make sense because it confuses even you, let alone users, don’t hesitate to shuffle pages around.

Page titles and links

Those attention triggers that come from the contextual setting appear in several forms:

• Page titles: Page titles are the first indicator of what’s on the actual pages that users see – in your page tree (or search results). The longer the page, the more difficult it is to construct a meaningful title.

• Page tree: Hiding the page tree is like taking a map from a lost person. This is why you need to make your page titles meaningful and informative.

• Links to related content: There are two approaches to using links effectively in your content.

  • In a standalone section, typically at the end of the page.

  • Within the actual text, most often in the form “For more information, see Awesome Page”.

Tips and tricks

The main body of documentation may often benefit from adding small information snippets that provide a bit of extra information to some users. For example:

• prerequisites

• permissions

• limitations

• consequences / effects

• compatibility issues

Adding these extra details is, of course, at your discretion. But as you evaluate feedback, work with the presumption that if your customer success manager reported one customer being confused, chances are there are more.

This is often a great situation to add a panel callout in your documentation that either fully explains the related concept or links to another page that does.

Maintain Documentation, Maintain Trust

Great documentation isn’t just about information. It’s about enabling people; your users, your teammates, your future self to succeed without needing to ask for help.

So if you’ve made it through this documentation guide, we hope you’ve picked up not just a process, but a mindset: that your knowledge is worth sharing, it’s valuable, and that sharing it well takes intention, care, and the occasional cleanup reminder.