When I started working with clients, I always wanted to give them the best, so I would send videos, guides, documentation, everything, and I ended up overwhelming them. A few weeks or months later, they would still come back with questions, and it took me some time to realize that more documentation does not necessarily mean better documentation.
Documentation is necessary, and that is not even a question. We spend weeks or months creating something with people, and if they cannot use what we have built, then it is not very useful at all. But the format matters, and we have to get really good at simple. Look at the problem we came to solve and at how the team learns. Are they more visual, would they prefer written documentation, or would they rather have someone walk them through it live?
It always depends on the client, the business, and the people using what we’ve created. If I notice that we have frequent meetings, that they love to jump on calls, and that they like a screen-sharing vibe where we go through the tool together, then a visual resource like videos, screen recordings, or live training might work really well. For teams that don’t have time to get on a call, we create very simple written documentation instead. With documentation, SOPs, and guides, we want to teach it, see it, and do it, and the format or flow depends on your team and the problem you’re trying to solve.
You don’t need everything, though. If we’re coming in to work on a system and the problem with previous tools has always been adaptation or using them, I’m not going to overwhelm team members with a lot of documentation, process maps, or extensive videos that go on for five or ten minutes. That is not going to help anyone, because the goal is to make it easier for people to use what we’ve built. We want our people to be able to make decisions comfortably and independently, and the only way they can do that is if they’re confident enough in the tool and know how to use it, which is exactly what the documentation and resources should give them.
So how much do you need? You can have different quantities. A measuring spoon doesn’t need to be a cup just because a cup can hold more. Give people what they need to use the thing properly, in the format that works best for them, and remember that we have to get really good at simple.