I was recently moved to the marketing team at my company, and that shift has made me reflect more deeply on the role documentation plays in our go-to-market strategy.
Before this move, we've had several product releases, and one requirement stayed constant across all of them: the documentation had to be ready at the time of release. This wasn’t because the product was unintuitive or unusable without docs. It was because the documentation was an integral part of the product experience. A release simply wasn’t considered complete without it.
At a glance, this pattern can be dismissed as operational hygiene. After all, good teams ship docs alongside code. But when you look closer, it points to something more fundamental about how users actually experience products today.
For many products, especially developer-facing ones, documentation is often the first real interaction users have with the product. Before they sign up, before they deploy anything, and sometimes even before they talk to sales, they read the docs. This is where they assess whether the product does what it claims, whether it fits their use case, and whether it is worth investing time and effort into.
In practice, documentation often carries more weight than landing pages or launch blogs. Marketing content may introduce the promise of the product, but documentation is where that promise is tested. It turns positioning into reality by showing how things actually work, what trade-offs exist, and how quickly a user can succeed.
Seen through this lens, documentation is not just a supporting artifact but a marketing tool in its own right. It communicates product value, builds trust at the moment of highest intent, and plays a direct role in adoption.
In this article, I want to unpack why documentation functions this way, and why teams should start treating it as a first-class part of their go-to-market strategy rather than an afterthought.
Table of Contents
The Role of Documentation in a User's Journey
The customer journey does not begin when someone clicks “Buy now” or "Start free trial."
Long before that moment, users are already forming opinions about whether a product is credible, usable, and worth their time. In traditional marketing models, this early phase is described as awareness and evaluation. But for technical products, that evaluation phase looks very different from what classic marketing funnels suggest.
Instead of relying primarily on demos, sales conversations, or brand messaging, technical buyers tend to self-educate. Research from Gartner shows that modern B2B buyers spend a majority of their decision-making process researching independently before ever speaking to sales, and this behavior is even more pronounced among technical audiences who prefer primary sources over promotional material.
For developer tools, APIs, and infrastructure products, documentation becomes one of those primary sources. Users move from high-level marketing pages into documentation to answer concrete questions such as how the product works, what it integrates with, what assumptions it makes, and what it will realistically take to adopt. This transition from marketing to documentation is a natural progression in the evaluation process.
In the book The Product Is Docs, the Splunk documentation team describes this transition as needing to be “seamless, cohesive, and logical.” Their point, much more than consistency in tone or branding, is about continuity of understanding.
When users move from marketing content into documentation, they are testing whether the product narrative holds up under scrutiny. If the documentation is incomplete, confusing, or disconnected from what marketing promised, confidence drops quickly, not only in the docs, but in the product itself.
This idea aligns closely with broader research on content-driven buying behavior. Studies on developer experience consistently show that documentation quality is a key factor in product evaluation and adoption. A report by SlashData found that poor or unclear documentation is one of the top reasons developers abandon tools during evaluation, even when the underlying technology is sound.
What this highlights is that documentation does not sit at the end of the user journey, after a purchase has been made. It sits directly in the middle of the decision-making process. It acts as the bridge between curiosity and commitment. Marketing may introduce the problem space and position the solution, but documentation is where users validate whether the solution is real, usable, and aligned with their needs.
The Splunk team refers to this as creating an “integrated content experience,” where marketing and documentation work together to guide users from initial awareness through evaluation, purchase, and successful implementation.
How to Build Trust at the Moment of Highest Intent
When users arrive at your documentation, they’re no longer casually exploring. They’re actively evaluating whether your product fits their needs and whether it’s worth committing time, effort, or money to. This is what makes documentation a uniquely high-intent touchpoint in the user journey.
In marketing terms, high-intent moments are rare and valuable. They occur when users are close to making a decision and are seeking confirmation.
For technical products, documentation is often the primary surface where this confirmation happens. Research from Google on decision-making behavior shows that users rely heavily on “trust signals” at moments of intent, and for technical buyers, accuracy and depth of information matter more than persuasive language.
This is why documentation quality has an outsized impact on outcomes. When users encounter clear and practical documentation during evaluation, confidence increases. When they encounter gaps, inconsistencies, or ambiguity, doubt sets in immediately. Unlike marketing content, documentation doesn’t get the benefit of abstraction. It’s expected to be precise and complete.
Documentation is part of a continuous guide that “holds a customer’s hand” from evaluation through purchase and into successful usage. This framing is important because it highlights that trust isn’t built once and forgotten. It’s maintained across stages. Documentation inherits the trust marketing creates, but it must earn its own by demonstrating technical credibility and practical value.
This is the point where many products fail because marketing successfully drives interest, but documentation breaks the trust loop by failing to support the claims made earlier. When that happens, users don’t just lose confidence in the docs but also in the product and, by extension, the company behind it.
So, What Actually Builds Trust in Documentation?
Trust in documentation isn’t subjective. It’s shaped by specific, observable qualities that users quickly pick up on during evaluation.
Accuracy is the foundation. When examples work as described, and behavior matches documentation, users feel safe moving forward. When it doesn’t, you have a problem. Studies on developer experience consistently rank inaccurate documentation as one of the fastest ways to lose adoption, even when the underlying product is powerful.
Completeness is a signal of maturity. Documentation that covers core workflows, edge cases, and limitations tells users that the product has been thought through. Gaps, missing sections, or “coming soon” pages suggest instability or unfinished work. For evaluators, this raises red flags about long-term viability.
Another point is honesty, which plays an equally important role. Strong documentation doesn’t hide constraints or trade-offs. Instead, it acknowledges them clearly. Research in trust psychology shows that transparency, even about limitations, increases perceived credibility because it reduces uncertainty and surprises later.
Also, more recently updated docs reflect better on team health. Updated documentation signals active maintenance and ongoing investment. On the other hand, outdated docs suggest abandonment or stagnation. For technical buyers, this is often interpreted as a warning sign about support and future development.
Finally, usability determines whether trust can even form. Documentation that is difficult to navigate, poorly structured, or even hard to search fails before its content is evaluated. Nielsen Norman Group’s research on information-seeking behavior shows that users abandon content quickly when they cannot find answers with minimal effort, regardless of quality.
Together, these factors shape how users perceive not just the documentation, but the product and organization behind it.
Documentation and Marketing: A Partnership
In the book The Product is Docs, the authors observe that documentation teams and marketing teams "have more in common than you might think." Both are responsible for communicating product value to audiences, both create content that influences buying decisions, and both play crucial roles in the customer journey.
Yet these teams often operate separately, thereby creating disconnected experiences for users.
Marketing promises capabilities without understanding technical constraints, while documentation focuses on implementation details without connecting to broader use cases or business value.
The result of this is a jarring transition from marketing to product that undermines both efforts.
So, how can marketing help documentation?
Marketing teams bring a valuable perspective to documentation:
Customer insights: Marketing interacts directly with prospects and customers through demos, events, and demand generation. These interactions surface real questions and pain points that documentation should address.
Competitive intelligence: Understanding how competitors document their products can reveal opportunities for differentiation or improvement.
Strategic priorities: Knowing which features marketing will emphasize helps documentation teams focus their effort where it will have the most impact.
Target audience definition: Marketing's customer research and personas can inform documentation structure and examples.
And...how can good documentation help marketing?
Documentation teams bring equally valuable assets to the partnership:
Technical accuracy: Documentation teams can review marketing materials for technical correctness and help refine messaging to be both compelling and accurate.
Content leverage: Well-written documentation can be adapted into blog posts, white papers, and other marketing content.
User feedback: Documentation teams often receive direct feedback from users about what's confusing or what features resonate most.
Writing expertise: Technical writers can help develop clearer, more effective marketing content.
The Splunk team emphasizes that this collaboration should span the entire release cycle: "Before you write" (to align on priorities and naming), "As you write" (to validate approaches), and "After you write" (to ensure consistency and quality).
Figure 1: Embedding docs in the release cycle
Practical Implications: Treating Docs as Marketing
If documentation is indeed a marketing tool, what changes in how we approach it?
1. Documentation should ship with product launches
This is where my own experience began. Documentation can't be an afterthought that ships weeks after launch. If docs are part of how users evaluate and adopt the product, they need to be ready when the product is. This means involving documentation teams early in the development process, not at the end.
As the Splunk team notes in their discussion of Agile development: "There is no definition of ‘done’ without docs. Customer documentation is part of the working software." This principle should extend to marketing launches as well.
2. Invest in documentation quality and discoverability
If documentation influences buying decisions, it deserves the same attention to quality and user experience as marketing websites. This means:
Professional design and navigation
Fast search functionality
Clear information architecture
Mobile-friendly formatting
SEO optimization for relevant queries
Too often, documentation sites are neglected from a UX perspective while marketing pages receive constant refinement. This sends a message about priorities that users notice.
3. Create an integrated content experience
The transition from marketing to documentation should feel natural. This requires:
Consistent terminology: Features should be named the same way in marketing materials and documentation.
Aligned narratives: The use cases highlighted in marketing should have detailed implementation guides in the documentation.
Cross-linking: Marketing pages should link directly to relevant documentation sections, and vice versa.
Shared success metrics: Both teams should care about the same outcomes – not just awareness or signups, but successful implementation and adoption.
The Splunk team describes this as helping customers avoid feeling "disoriented or, worse, feel misled." Good documentation delivers on marketing's promises with specifics on how to achieve the outcomes that were advertised.
4. Measure documentation impact on conversion
If documentation is part of the marketing funnel, it should be measured as such. As a documentation team, you should track metrics like:
Documentation page views from prospective customers
Time spent in docs before conversion
Most-viewed pages during evaluation periods
Correlation between documentation engagement and trial-to-paid conversion
Customer feedback on documentation quality during the buying process
These metrics help demonstrate documentation's business impact and justify investment in quality improvements.
If you're curious about examples of docs that embody these strategies, then you might want to check out Twilio, Stripe, or, as mentioned earlier, the Splunk docs.
Why does all this matter now?
The role of documentation in driving adoption has always been important, but several trends are making it more critical:
First, as more companies adopt PLG strategies, the product experience, including documentation, becomes the primary sales vehicle. There's no sales team to answer questions or guide implementation. The docs must do that work.
Second, technical buyers increasingly want to evaluate products independently before engaging with sales. Documentation is often their primary evaluation tool.
We’re also seeing shorter sales cycles. When buying cycles compress, there's less time for demos and sales engineering. Documentation needs to answer questions immediately.
And finally, for developer tools and infrastructure products, individual contributors often drive adoption from the bottom up. These users rely heavily on documentation for their evaluation process.
In this environment, treating documentation as an operational necessity rather than a strategic asset is a competitive disadvantage. Companies that recognize documentation as a core part of their go-to-market strategy and invest accordingly see better conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.
Conclusion
Documentation is not just a post-purchase support resource. It's an active participant in the customer journey, influencing buying decisions and driving adoption.
For technical products, especially, documentation often carries more weight than traditional marketing materials.
This doesn't mean documentation should become marketing copy. It means recognizing that documentation performs a marketing function such as communicating value and building credibility, even while maintaining its technical accuracy and practical focus.
As the Splunk documentation team wisely notes, the goal is to create an integrated content experience where marketing and documentation work together to guide users from initial interest through successful implementation.
So, the requirement that documentation be ready at release time wasn't just operational hygiene. It was recognition that our product wasn't truly ready for market until users could both evaluate it and successfully use it. That's what makes documentation a marketing tool, not because it makes exaggerated claims, but because it delivers on the promise that marketing makes.