This post is the second in a series of posts about making a business case for documentation. It explains how to understand your company's goals and interests.

Making a business case for documentation: Post 2 - Know your company’s goals

In the first post of this series, we mentioned a few definitions of good documentation and explained why it’s important to make a business case for documentation. Now we’ll explain how to understand your company’s goals and interests.

Different organizational strategies and business goals fundamentally shape how a company approaches technical documentation.

Before making a business case for documentation for a particular software system, consider getting to know the company’s current strategy.

By understanding these strategic models, we can demonstrate the critical role of documentation across various business goals. We outline a few popular business strategies commonly existing in the companies today.

Growth strategy

Focuses on expanding market share, increasing revenue, and scaling the business.

Documentation supports growth by:

Reducing barriers to entry for new users and customers.
Enabling faster onboarding and user adoption.
Supporting scalability of product knowledge across the organization.
Increased consumption and adoption.

Differentiation strategy

Aims to create unique value by offering products or services that are distinctly different from competitors, often through innovation.

Documentation becomes a key differentiator by:

Creating a superior user experience.
Showcasing technical expertise and product capabilities.
Building trust and credibility with sophisticated users and stakeholders.

Cost leadership strategy

Seeks to become the lowest-cost producer in an industry, allowing the company to offer competitive pricing.

Documentation drives cost efficiency through:

Reducing customer support costs through self-service.
Minimizing training and onboarding expenses.
Decreasing knowledge transfer overhead.
Lowering technical debt.

Focus or niche strategy

Concentrates on serving a specific market segment or narrow customer group extremely well.

Documentation reinforces niche positioning by:

Providing deep, specialized knowledge.
Catering to specific user needs with precision.
Demonstrating domain expertise.
Increasing consumption in the segments the company focuses on.

Strategic questions to consider

When evaluating documentation’s role, consider these broader strategic questions:

Strategic positioning: How does documentation support the company’s core strategic approach?
Competitive advantage: Can documentation create or enhance the company’s unique market position? What type of documentation does the competition offer?
Value proposition: How does documentation contribute to the product’s overall value for customers?
Knowledge management: How does documentation support internal knowledge retention and transfer?
Customer lifecycle: How can documentation improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction?

Demonstrating revenue value and growth

Many companies perceive documentation as a cost rather than a profit generator because it’s challenging to directly link documentation efforts to revenue. Unlike marketing and sales activities, which have a clear impact on revenue, quantifying the value of documentation in dollar figures is challenging.

Engineering (which includes documentation as well) usually comes from one of three budgets:

Sales or marketing
Research and development
Maintenance and support

Follow the money to find out how to justify the business value of documentation:

Funding source for documentation	Business value to focus on	Typical documentation goals
Sales or marketing budget	Reducing sales cycles, helping with upselling, improving product discoverability and adoption, enabling self-service for customers. A key driver is building trust, which comes from demonstrating both product quality and adherence to good processes.	Create quality customer-facing materials like product guides, technical white papers, and case studies to build product understanding and trust.
Research and development budget	Accelerating time-to-market, reducing technical debt, and fostering a culture of innovation and knowledge sharing, which increases workforce productivity.	Develop internal technical documentation, design specifications, and innovation reports that boost workforce productivity and support long-term product innovation.
Maintenance and support budget	Reducing downtime, improving troubleshooting efficiency, and minimizing the risk of knowledge loss due to staff turnover.	Produce system maintenance manuals, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge transfer documents to support operations and reliability.

Funding source for documentation

Business value to focus on

Typical documentation goals

Sales or marketing budget

Reducing sales cycles, helping with upselling, improving product discoverability and adoption, enabling self-service for customers. A key driver is building trust, which comes from demonstrating both product quality and adherence to good processes.

Create quality customer-facing materials like product guides, technical white papers, and case studies to build product understanding and trust.

Research and development budget

Accelerating time-to-market, reducing technical debt, and fostering a culture of innovation and knowledge sharing, which increases workforce productivity.

Develop internal technical documentation, design specifications, and innovation reports that boost workforce productivity and support long-term product innovation.

Maintenance and support budget

Reducing downtime, improving troubleshooting efficiency, and minimizing the risk of knowledge loss due to staff turnover.

Produce system maintenance manuals, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge transfer documents to support operations and reliability.

Points to keep in mind

Make yourself familiar with your company’s business model and overall goals.
Be aware of the budget that supports your team.
Sync with other teams under the same budget and understand their goals.
Link the relevant goals and budgets to documentation.

After developing a good understanding of your company’s goals, you might want to assess the current state of documentation in your company. This will be covered in the next post.

Making a business case for documentation. Post 2 - Know your company's goals