Welcome to your monthly round-up in the world of documentation from the Tech Writing team at FINN!

Content highlights

June saw three entire articles go live, courtesy of our wonderful FINNies 🥳

At FINN, we believe in being customer-first. That applies to external and internal customers. As an internal-facing team, we technical writers are always keen to understand the needs of the teams we enable and to provide them with the best documentation experience. Open communication is a key way for us to achieve that.

By interviewing the engineers and analysts working in our data stack, we discovered the need to update and expand the user guides and overviews they’re using over the past couple of months. Managing large and complex documentation ecosystems can be daunting but actively listening to your intended audience is a surefire way to ensure you’re always focusing on the highest-value endeavors.

The best things we read last month 🤩

The Postman 2023 State of the API report is out! Did you know that the number one obstacle to consuming APIs according to respondents is outdated documentation? Are your docs up to date?

The Surprising Power of Documentation

“Document to empower, document to grow.” Vadim Kravcenko discusses how a pro-documentation philosophy can transform not just in your career, but also how you view and navigate the world of technology.

Deep dive into 2022 State of DevOps Report on documentation

”From our analysis, we’ve found a clear link between documentation quality and organizational performance — the organization’s ability to meet their performance and profitability goals. Just like a plant needs water and sunshine to thrive, an organization with good technical practices and documentation is significantly more likely to meet or exceed their performance goals.” From the Google Cloud blog.

Can you read or write? A metadata story

Metadata can make or break the experience of understanding and trusting the data. Learn how to make your data FAIR in this post from Pascal Heus.

What I Learned From Interviewing Potential Users Before Designing an API

An easy way to ensure your API meets the needs of its intended users is to design it with their needs in mind. Learn what questions you need to ask to validate your assumptions and design an API your users will truly love in this blog post from Bruno Pedro.

3 ideas on AI readiness, the role of APIs and developer portals in generative AI systems

Kristof van Tomme discusses how technical documentation and APIs could be leveraged as training sources for AI tools and what infrastructure considerations you need to keep in mind on your AI journey.

Creating a Taxonomy from the Ground Up with Findability in Focus

Learn how strategic labeling of content can help transform your documentation from knowledge bits into a rich ecosystem in this ClickHelp blog post.

Save the date

Upcoming virtual events in July.