Answer with docs

Andrew Jones
Jan 4, 2022

As someone who works in an enablement team, I’m trying to instil a best practice of answering with docs. This has a number of benefits to both us and our users:

  • It ensures our documentation is constantly improving and being kept up to date
  • It trains users to look in the docs first, before asking, allowing them to self-serve
  • It reduces future toil

This means when a question comes in via Slack or otherwise we try to answer by linking to the documentation. If there isn’t any, first write some up and then use that as the answer. This should apply to our internal documentation and our own runbooks.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has tried something like this and how successful (or otherwise!) it’s been.

Originally published at https://andrew-jones.com/blog/answer-with-docs/.

Cover image from Unsplash.

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Andrew Jones

Principal Engineer 🔧. Created Data Contracts, then wrote the book on it 📙. Google Developer Expert. Passionate about data and driving value from it.