Planning
Documentation that fails rarely fails sentence by sentence. It fails because the page set was decided by what was easy to write — the feature list, the API surface — rather than by what somebody arrives needing.
Which route are you on
from code, from existing docs, from a product with no docs at all, or from nothing. The route decides everything downstream.
Know the reader
auditing the product and its buyer before writing the page.
Deciding the page set
the structure, before a page exists.
Sources to build from
the four routes into creation and what each one can and cannot give you.
Publishing
preview, publish, configure.
The reading that most often changes the plan is not in this section: it is demand gaps, the audit of readers who never arrived. A page that does not exist has no traffic, so no number will ever point at it.