A cloud data company recently made what it described as targeted staff cuts, eliminating its entire technical writing and documentation department. According to reports, the Product Managers will take on documentation responsibilities from now on.
There may be perfectly sound reasons for this. For example: cost pressures, a need to move faster to market, confidence in AI-assisted content generation, or the expectation that this is a temporary arrangement. Any of these could be part of the story.
Without knowing the specifics, it would be unfair to draw firm conclusions about what this means for this specific company or its customers.
But if you’re a competitor, it’s reasonable to pay attention, and to act on what you observe.
Let your customers and prospects know
If your documentation is genuinely strong, this is a opportunity to make that visible. Your organisation’s values (and how customers might react) probably mean a pointed attack isn’t appropriate. But it can be a straightforward part of how you talk about your product and your approach to customer support.
In sales conversations and customer check-ins, it’s fair to mention that documentation is a dedicated function at your company. You have people whose entire job is to make sure users can understand and use your product effectively.
You might invite prospects to consider what a company’s investment in documentation says about how it thinks about the post-sale experience.
You’re not asking them to draw negative conclusions. You’re giving them useful context and encouraging them to pay attention as things develop.
Monitor documentation quality objectively
One practical advantage competitors have here is that software documentation makes testable claims. Tools like Doc-Detective, Cypress, Playwright, and Selenium can verify whether documented procedures and workflows actually match what a product does.
If you have legitimate access to a competitor’s product, perhaps through a trial account, you can run their documented processes against the live application and record the results.
Doing this regularly over time builds an evidence base. If the number of discrepancies between documentation and product behaviour is growing, you have something concrete to point to. You have observed data, which is more credible than speculation.
This matters to the people you’re selling to, because documentation failures have a habit of surfacing at high-pressure moments. For example: just before a deadline, during an incident in the wee small hours, or when someone new to the team is trying to follow a procedure that no longer reflects how the product works.
Giving prospects a factual picture of documentation reliability is a genuine service. The goal is to help your customers make well-informed decisions.
An important caveat
This only makes sense if your own documentation is in good condition. If you’re going to make documentation quality part of your value proposition, it needs to hold up under scrutiny. A prospect who takes your point seriously will look at both products. So make sure the comparison reflects well on you.
Hi Ellis,
I’ve been reflecting on the article regarding the cloud data company dissolving its documentation team. It’s a sharp piece, but I believe there is an even more aggressive, strategic angle to explore: the competitive extraction of institutional knowledge.
The article focuses on how we can prove their docs are failing. I’m interested in how we can exploit the fact that their product and internal intelligence are now vulnerable. I’ve seen this play out firsthand in my own career, and it’s a powerful lever:
The “Trojan Horse” Talent Play: Early in my career, after being made redundant by an EPOS provider, a direct competitor immediately headhunted me specifically to benchmark their system against my deep knowledge of the Centara system. Many years later, I worked at Interxion, a Dutch-based data centre provider. When I left COLT, a competitor interviewed me for the same reason—they wanted the “inside track” on how their rival operated. However, I rejected the offer to take another contract.
The Strategic Intelligence Gap: When a company fires its entire documentation team, it isn’t just losing writers; it is releasing the “curators” of their system’s secrets. These individuals know every workaround, every unpatched bug, and every roadmap delay. By proactively recruiting these “refugees,” we don’t just improve our docs—we gain a blueprint of the competitor’s technical debt.
The Innovation Tax: Forcing product managers (PMs) to write documentation introduces a massive internal bottleneck. Every hour a PM spends fixing a broken tutorial is an hour they aren’t spending on the roadmap. We can position our product as “faster to innovate” because our leadership is focused on the future, while theirs is bogged down in maintenance.
Engineering “Tribal Knowledge”: Without professional writers to bridge the gap between Dev and User, the competitor’s knowledge becomes siloed. This leads to a degradation of the actual software over time. We can highlight that our dedicated doc function ensures our code remains transparent and scalable, while theirs drifts toward chaos.
Essentially, I see this as an opportunity to move beyond comparing help files and instead frame their decision as a structural failure that invites “knowledge sabotage” from the outside.
Michael