Documentation Debt: Inefficient docs and how we fix them
Onboarding delays in SaaS companies are often blamed on product complexity. But more often than not, the real issue is simpler: a key setup step was documented six sprints ago and never updated.
This is not unusual. Documentation gets fragmented, buried, or quietly outdated. The result isn’t catastrophic, just a steady buildup of friction: onboarding slows down, support tickets pile up, and teams fall back on outdated notes or Slack threads.
This is documentation debt. It builds up quietly, then starts costing time across functions.
Most teams don’t ignore docs on purpose; it just falls behind in the rush to ship. This post looks at how that debt accumulates, why it sticks around, and what it takes to fix it without overcomplicating your workflow.
How Documentation Debt Accumulates
Most SaaS teams don’t neglect documentation. They struggle because their systems reward speed over clarity. Debt builds up in predictable ways:
Scattered Ownership
Documentation lives across tools: Notion, Confluence, shared drives, internal wikis, even someone’s desktop. During discovery, we often see multiple copies of the same setup guide floating in different formats. With no clear owner, updates slip through the cracks, and multiple versions coexist without anyone noticing.
Toolchain Incompatibility
Sometimes the tools themselves make things harder. One team writes in Notion, another in Google Docs, while support uses a separate help center. In one audit, we saw a GitHub-based docs-as-code setup with React. Editorial tools were added to help with reviews, but because the backend wasn't properly configured, syntax errors still slipped through. Without a shared system, it’s easy for things to break or fall out of sync.
Reactive Updates
Docs are updated only when something breaks. A support ticket escalates. A customer hits a dead end. A new team member flags confusion. Until then, gaps go unnoticed and unaddressed.
Feature-First Mindset
New features ship fast. Documentation is postponed to the next sprint, which quickly becomes the next quarter. Meanwhile, support and success teams are left to fill in the gaps manually.
Local Workarounds
When official docs fall behind, teams build their own. Support maintains internal wikis. Engineers keep notes in Slack threads. Sales repurposes old pitch decks. These stopgaps help in the short term but fragment knowledge and introduce drift over time.
Why Documentation Debt Persists
Three factors keep documentation debt alive:
1. Docs Create Friction, Not Failures
When a product breaks, everyone notices right away. But documentation gaps only cause small, accumulative delays, so they rarely get prioritized.
2. The Wrong Problem Gets Blamed
Teams often blame long onboarding times on product complexity or recent feature changes. But in recent audits, we found friction more often came from outdated or incomplete setup steps: missing prerequisites, undocumented default settings, or conditional integrations not clearly explained. In fact, 63% of customers say the onboarding experience directly influences their buying decision (Source: “The Impact of Poor Onboarding on SaaS Growth”, xFusion, 2023).
3. No One Owns the Docs
Teams aren’t always clear who should keep documentation updated. Without a clear owner, whether Product, Support, or Marketing, it often gets forgotten.
A Real Example of a SaaS Audit
In a recent engagement with a fintech SaaS company, we ran a full documentation audit. We sampled everything from onboarding guides and KB articles to API references and configuration steps. We also spoke with Product, Sales, and Support teams to understand where users and employees were hitting bottlenecks.
Two major friction points came up repeatedly:
Discoverability: Users couldn’t find the right doc or found outdated ones.
Technical Accuracy: Missing prerequisites, misdocumented default behaviors, and unclear conditional setups, especially in onboarding.
We consolidated duplicate and related documents into a cleaner architecture. Some guides we rewritten into targeted, accessible flows. One key win: we created a single “Getting Started with Integrations” guide, which quickly became the most-viewed help doc and cut down related support tickets significantly. Within just two weeks, onboarding time dropped from 11 days to 6, simply by fixing documentation debt.
The Cost of Ignoring Doc Debt
When documentation falls short, the friction spreads across teams:
Support gets flooded with repeat questions; technically answered somewhere, but hard to find.
Sales loses confidence explaining feature changes without reliable references.
Engineers context-switch to explain basics that should be documented.
Onboarding slows down, becomes inconsistent, and gets harder to scale.
And Customer Experience suffers too: 86% of customers say they’re more likely to stick with companies that invest in onboarding and education (Source: Document360’s “Customer Onboarding for 2025“).
As one Engineering Lead told us during a content audit:
“Our senior engineers spend hours every week writing Slack messages just to fill in gaps that should be in the docs. That’s not a good use of $100K talent.”
Our Solution: the CDC Framework
Documentation doesn’t work well as a one-off cleanup. It needs to function like any other part of product infrastructure, always evolving. The CDC (Content Development Cycle) is a framework we use with SaaS teams to make documentation sustainable and aligned with product growth.
Discovery: We start by mapping what’s already in place: onboarding guides, API docs, setup walkthroughs, KB articles. We surface what’s outdated, duplicated, or buried and talk to stakeholders across Product, Sales, and Support to capture friction from every angle.
Structuring: We rebuild the information architecture around real user flows. That includes reorganizing content, standardizing page types (guides, how-tos, reference), and clarifying naming. For a SaaS API platform, we restructured docs into Build, Scale, and Troubleshoot tracks, mapped to developer stages. Support tickets dropped noticeably as a result.
Creation: We create lean, role-specific assets: Getting Started guides, KB articles, troubleshooting flows. This matters: only 48% of SaaS companies tailor onboarding by role or use-case (Source: Userpilot, “The State of SaaS Product Onboarding”, 2023).
In one case, consolidating scattered setup notes into a single guide not only reduced support load, but also become the most-viewed page in their help center within 14 days.Maintenance: Finally, we build in ownership and update rhythms: review cycles and update triggers tied to product releases, so docs don’t go stale without anyone noticing.
Why the CDC Works
Most documentation efforts stall because they’re treated like content sprints. The CDC model works because it builds structure around how documentation is maintained:
Clear ownership is assigned
Content is tied to outcomes (onboarding time, support deflection, CSAT)
Updates follow a rhythm aligned with product velocity
Making Documentation Work Again
Documentation doesn’t need a massive overhaul to deliver value. A single, high-friction area like “Onboarding Week 1” or “Integrations Setup” can serve as a proving ground. With the right structure, ownership, and cadence, even small changes can unblock teams and reduce avoidable work and rebuild trust in documentation across your organization.
We’re here to help you create content that works for you. Reach out to us to know how we can optimize your documentation processes and deliver solutions that align with your goals, today.
