How to document existing products and their development?

Question

My product have been going for almost three years without any product requirement or documentation at all. And at this moment things are getting out of hands.

For example when I hire new people, it takes a lot of energy and time to teach them because the knowledge is centralized into few key people. And when we want to develop or improve new feature we don't have any idea what are the KPIs.

Therefore I'm planning to document all of my products. I do have some key points in my mind that I want to document, such as the goal of the product, the KPI, the user flow. But I don't have any idea how other organization are doing it?

1. How should I start?
2. What other important things I should document aside from points I mentioned above?
3. Are there commonly used document template for this?
4. What are commonly used tools for this?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

For the sake of being straight forward, here goes.

1. Start now, start small. Goal, KPIs, and user flow should be enough to get you started. Document those things appropriately before going any further.

2. Add some technical things like data source, third party tools, or other things that might be beneficial when you're products are going through further development.

3. I suggest that you go with a wiki approach. Thus, you can focus more on the content of your documentation instead of the format of your documentation. As I said before: start now, start small.

4. Wiki tools are definitely my recommendation for you. There are a lot of wiki tools out there for us to use. Pick one and start documenting.