Why your company needs a Technical Content Strategy
Renzo and I were recently discussing common challenges with documentation and how to overcome them. We realized “documentation” doesn’t quite capture it. What we’re really talking about is product technical content — the source of truth engineers depend on to build, integrate, test, and scale the product with clarity and precision.
Product technical content as a lifeline for business
Everyone knows “cash is king” and cashflow is the lifeline of any business. We say product technical content is just as critical, especially when a deep-tech company reaches commercialization, scale, or field deployment. Without it, your product won’t be understood, sold, integrated, or supported, and growth grinds to a halt.
Common approaches don’t work and lead to typical issues
Traditional tools like Microsoft Word, Adobe FrameMaker, or SharePoint often fall short in modern documentation workflows. They treat content as static digital replicas of paper files, making it rigid and difficult to scale. They assume documentation is monolithic, requiring bulk, inflexible updates with no support for sequencing, dependencies, or asynchronous collaboration. Compliance is managed through snapshot-based approvals at arbitrary milestones, resulting in disconnected versions with limited traceability and historical context.
What you need instead is a modern strategy, one built on tools and workflows shaped in tandem with software development over the last decade, primarily as open-source solutions. These approaches prioritize collaboration, automation, modularity, and scale.
Establishing a modern product technical content strategy helps when:
- Publishing is chaotic with no version control, audit trails, or access restrictions, causing compliance and IP risks.
- Documentation lives in silos and lacks consistent standards, leading to duplicated and conflicting information.
- There are no clear ownership or accountability mechanisms to track who changed what and why.
- Engineers are the primary authors and write documentation without templates, tools, or support. This results in content that is rushed, incomplete, and inconsistent.
- Review processes are slow and ineffective, often involving too many (or wrong) reviewers with no contextual feedback.
- Lack of feedback tools means teams don’t know if their documentation is useful or read.
- Content is unstructured and unsearchable. This prevents AI-readiness, machine learning use, automation, and efficient onboarding at scale
What can we do about it?
Over the last 10 years or so, we've seen a slow adoption of modern tools in a more hardware-based environment. With a growing fusion of hardware and software teams, it’s more important than ever to ensure your company has the right approach to a long-term, scalable strategy.
A Technical Content Strategy is an encapsulation of tools and workflows to create a long-term, scalable solution to publishing internal and external documentation. Its objectives are to:
- Define a tooling and authoring stack — keep teams aligned
- Ensure AI readiness and semantic structure
- Establish content governance and quality models —One source of truth means no misfires, no guesswork
- Maximize automation — Speedup execution for fast onboarding, less friction and faster shipping
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Build a launchpad for a good documentation culture:
- Lock in know-how to protect critical knowledge so it never walks out the door
- Drive adoption to transform complex tech into clear, trusted content that wins customers
About the authors
Renzo Parodi — 10+ years of top-tier management consulting experience, specializing in organisational effectiveness, operating model design, and transformational change management.
David Image — 10+ years of experience implementing lean and scalable documentation systems.