Gone are the days when product documentation was confined to just creating user guides or “help” articles to provide details about how to use a certain product. Product Documentation today is a lot more than a “good-to-have” document to “must-have” assets.
The organisations that have realised the power of content have excelled and continue to lead the market. Examples? Microsft, Google, Apple, Stripe, Atlassian Firebase, and so on, to name a few. These companies have put in a significant amount of effort and investment to build and maintain their documentation and reaped the benefits.
What is Razorpay Docs
Razorpay Docs is a vast source of information on every product or feature that Razorpay offers, where and how to use them, how to integrate them and how to use the Razorpay APIs.
Razorpay Docs can be primarily divided into 3 segments:
- Product Documentation: Explains all the Razorpay products, features, benefits, and how to use them
- API Documentation: Explains all the Razorpay APIs with code samples and request/response parameter descriptions
- Integration Documentation: End-to-end, step-by-step integration flow with code samples and integration videos
Razorpay Docs comprises concepts, use cases, how-to tasks, workflow diagrams, screenshots, code samples, plenty of How-to videos (150+) and integration videos (~30), FAQs, and a Glossary.
Who Uses Razorpay Docs
Razorpay Docs user is every individual who comes to the Razorpay Docs site to understand more about Razorpay products. We have segmented our customers into the following types:
External
- Existing/New Razorpay Merchants trying to understand more about Razorpay products, concepts, and dashboard “how-to’s”.
- Merchant Developers trying to integrate Razorpay products or use Razorpay APIs.
There are also Razorpay Merchant’s customers who make payments using Razorpay Payment Gateway/Razorpay products and visit Razorpay Docs for information related to refunds.
Internal (Razorpay Folks)
- Support and Integrations Team
- Product
- Engineering
- Sales/Presales
- Everyone else at Razorpay accessing Razorpay Docs to know more about Razorpay products, APIs, and integrations.
Razorpay Docs – The Product
We look at Razorpay Docs as a product because:
- It requires continuous improvement, including fixes and enhancements.
- It helps reduce support costs by providing self-serve solutions through self-read articles and videos.
- It brings in more users to Razorpay by creating awareness and providing information about Razorpay products and offerings.
Razorpay Docs is a publicly available website that does not require any subscription or log-in. Anyone who wants to know about Razorpay can access it.
In the Product Life Cycle, Razorpay Docs is currently at the Growth stage. These days, users are more comfortable finding information on the internet, be it Google, YouTube, or self-learning forums and platforms.
With more innovation and sophistication seeping in, we expect the need for this product to grow multi-fold, which makes it one of the driving factors for making the user experience smoother and better.
Who Manages Razorpay Docs
There are different stakeholders of Razorpay Docs – Tech Writing, Product, and Engineering.
Tech Writing
The Tech Writing team is the primary owner and is responsible for every word you see on Razorpay Docs. They are the content curators, editors, and proofreaders who work with the Razorpay Product Managers to ensure every information and detail about the Razorpay products are accurately captured and presented to the users.
Product
The Docs Product Manager works with the designers, technical writers, and engineers to determine the features to build and deliver on the Docs platform.
Engineering
The Engineering Manager works with the engineers, testers, technical writers and Docs Product Manager to bring in the Docs platform capabilities.
Docs Strategy and Roadmap
Razorpay Docs’ strategy has revolved around writing simple, easy-to-understand articles that can be easily discovered and consumed.
Razorpay Docs Vision
Razorpay Docs – Single source of information for all that is Razorpay. Create comprehensive, easy-to-understand Razorpay Docs, which our users love and trust. Help users find answers to all questions related to Razorpay.
At the beginning of every financial year, the Technical Writing, Product, and Engineering come together to set the Docs strategy in alignment with the company’s goals and theme for the year. This year, our focus is on user experience.
In addition to the regular updates, we do to the Razorpay docs to keep our content up-to-date, we identify a few projects in alignment with our organisation and function goals.
We set goals at the onset of the financial year and track and measure the progress every quarter. We have several metrics such as User Satisfaction scores on Razorpay Docs using surveys, Google Analytics data to measure the traffic on the Razorpay Docs articles, and Razorpay Docs SEO.
This year, we have identified a few projects, such as:
- API Docs Revamping
- Simplifying Integrations Docs
- New features and capabilities on the Razorpay Docs platform
- The embedded User Feedback module
- New Razorpay Docs design with a central navigation system and enhanced look and feel
- Improved Search Capabilities
Apart from these, we are also evaluating a Docs ChatBot and building a Developer Community for Razorpay.
Research, Design, Engineering, and Implementation
As per our Docs roadmap, we pick up projects for every quarter. A few of these projects may be completely content-driven, a few may be design-driven or tech-driven, or a combination of design, content, and tech.
Project Definition and Scope
We define the project’s purpose and what needs to be added or improved. Based on the project scope, the teams own the projects. Many of these projects are co-owned by Product, Engineering,, and Technical Writing.
Data-Driven
Every initiative is data-driven to understand why it is essential to pick up the project, what problems we are trying to solve, and the expected outcome.
In content, not everything can be measured. For example, how do you measure the quality of articles? We have identified these parameters to measure the quality of our docs – Complete, Accurate, and Easy-to-Understand. While one can measure the completeness and accuracy of an article, it is difficult to measure the third parameter – Easy to Understand. What is easy to one may be difficult for others!
We use survey data on Razorpay Docs, conduct user interviews, and track user behaviour on the Razorpay Docs site to get insights about these parameters. We measure this month-on-month and, based on the findings finetune our docs strategy and focus areas.
Processes We Follow
We have streamlined processes and tools such as Asana to track our projects.
A few of these projects are content-heavy, where templates are decided after market study and competitor analysis. For example, when we revamped our product documents, we analysed our competitors and conducted thorough market research before deciding on our articles’ structure.
Some projects require input from Design and UX teams. For instance, we found that we had diagrams on Razorpay docs, which were inconsistent. The colours and styles were mixed up. We worked with the Design team to put a framework for the diagrams’ designs and standardised all our diagrams.
The project related to revamping the Razorpay Docs website required efforts from Design, Product, Engineering, and Tech Writing to bring the new website live.
Process in a Nutshell
- The Tech Writing, Product, and Design team conduct user research and user interviews, record user behaviours on the Razorpay docs site, and recommends improvements
- The Design and TW teams suggest design improvements and make content changes
- The Engineering team works on the designs and implements the new designs
- We measure the impact to validate our designs and content changes
For example, after we started publishing our revamped product documents, we could find a 5-7% improvement in the User Satisfaction scores in Razorpay Docs surveys. This validated that the users liked the changes we brought in.
What Razorpay Docs Achieved
With the approach mentioned above, we could significantly improve Razorpay Docs. Last year, we took up several new projects.
- We ran multiple docs initiatives projects such as Docs Revamping, Adding Sample Codes in Multiple SDK Server Languages such as PHP, NodeJS, Python, Ruby, Java, and Go, and developed 150+ Dashboard videos. We recorded a 13% improvement in the user satisfaction scores on Razorpay Docs.
- We built 30 integration videos and reduced the integration tickets by more than 50%.
More importantly, we have established that Docs should be treated as a critical offering and more of a Product that requires meticulous feature planning and continuous incremental improvement.
Where is Razorpay Docs
We started in 2016 with some 53 articles and have grown 28 times with over 1500 articles by 2022. Razorpay Docs was built on a philosophy of providing simple, easy-to-understand content that can help users get self-started with Razorpay.
We started with a rock-solid base with a handful of highly talented Technical Writers who had clear objectives. We have grown as a team and brought in streamlined processes, better tools, and exhaustive training sessions to train the new team members. We executed critical projects to establish Razorpay Docs as a serious piece of well-maintained knowledge source.
We keep evaluating Razorpay Docs to see where we stand compared to the best in the industry. With our eyes set on our goals, brilliant minds at work, and best-in-class work culture, we aspire to get the #1 spot very soon. Wait and watch!
