Prepare to write data-informed documentation

How you can do data-informed documentation depends on your organization. The data sources available to you, tooling, expertise, support, and time all contribute to the available capacity of your organization to do data analysis, and thus to perform data-informed documentation. Using data to inform every stage of every project of your documentation practice isn’t the right approach for every writer, or for every documentation team. For some writers, projects, or workflows, it might not make sense to add data. If you don’t have the analytics capacity, investing in a full data-informed documentation practice might not be worth it right now. I say this not to scare you off, but to set you up for success. Consider this post the prerequisites for doing data-informed documentation. Evaluate analytics capacity Before you start practicing data-informed documentation, assess the analytics capacity of your organization. The 2026 State of the Docs survey from Gitbook revealed that of the 1131…