Last week, I grabbed dinner with a friend who works in product marketing for a tier-two manufacturing company. At some point, our conversation drifted toward work, and he asked me a question I’ve answered a hundred times before: “What’s the value of documentation?”
I launched into my standard response. “Documentation bridges the gap between a product and its user. It reduces friction, smooths onboarding, and cuts down on support tickets. Good docs anticipate questions and allow engineers and product managers to focus on higher-value work.”
He nodded politely but looked skeptical. After a pause, he said, “Yeah, I get what you’re saying. But if I were hiring a technical writer, none of that would really strike me. There’s something missing from your answer. Technical writing does something else, but I can’t place what it is.”
That comment stayed with me. What if my go-to explanation has been too narrow? What if the value of documentation isn’t simply functional, but something deeper?
The Explanatory Problem
Most of us in the field explain documentation by listing what it prevents: onboarding pain, endless support tickets, frustrated users. And it’s true — those are real benefits. But they sound defensive, as if documentation’s role is merely to minimize damage. It reduces churn, saves costs, and deflects complaints.
The problem with this framing is that it misses the affirmative value of documentation. If all we can say is that documentation prevents chaos, then we imply that its worth is only negative space, valuable only in the absence of problems. That answer will never inspire confidence, let alone investment.
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