Are you looking for a way to simplify your product documentation without needing technical expertise? Apidog provides an all-in-one solution that enables product managers and operations teams to work together effortlessly on creating, managing, and publishing professional documentation. With an intuitive interface, real-time collaboration, and hassle-free publishing, Apidog completely reshapes how teams handle documentation.
Every product—no matter how user-friendly—needs documentation. Even if your application has a simple, intuitive design, there will always be details that require explanation. Adding these directly into the product interface often creates clutter, so clear documentation becomes essential. That's why managing, maintaining, and publishing documentation is critical for any product team.
Traditionally, teams rely on tools such as Notion, Confluence, CMS platforms, or documentation generators like Docusaurus and GitBook. While useful, these solutions often come with challenges:
- Writing documentation sometimes requires coding, raising costs and making the reading experience less than ideal.
- Collaboration across roles can lead to version conflicts, making it difficult to share and track improvements.
- Publishing to production is often either too simple (lacking control) or overly complex (requiring engineering effort), which can cause errors for non-technical colleagues.
Our own team at Apidog initially used Docusaurus to manage documentation. But as our docs grew and evolved, we ran into many of these same issues. To solve them, we built solutions directly into Apidog. Today, our product documentation has been fully migrated to Apidog—both creation and publishing happen inside the platform.
In the following sections, I'll share how we build product documentation step by step using Apidog. If you'd like to see the results firsthand, feel free to explore the Apidog Help Documentation—we'd love to hear your feedback.
Background
Before we dive into our approach, let's first set the stage so it's easier to understand why we work this way. At our company, product documentation is a joint effort between product managers and the operations team. The workflow looks like this:
- Product managers and operations collaborate to draft, refine, and finalize documentation.
- No technical staff are needed—the entire process is handled by these two teams.
With this in mind, I'll now walk you through how we use Apidog to build product documentation following this workflow.
Core Process of Building Product Documentation at Apidog
1. Create a Sprint Branch for Content Management and Collaboration
When a new development iteration begins, the operations team creates a sprint branch in Apidog. All documentation updates for that iteration are placed in this branch, ensuring smooth collaboration without directly affecting the main branch.
Once the branch is created:
- Product managers import existing documents that require updates, based on the features included in the iteration.
- New documents for newly developed features are also created directly within this branch.
This process works the same way as using sprint branches for API documentation, as we have taken the "docs as code" measure.
To maintain stability, the main branch is protected—no direct edits are allowed. In other words, you cannot manually change content in the published documentation that users see. This protection prevents random or accidental edits from introducing errors, ensuring the product documentation remains reliable and consistent.
2. Use the Beautiful Markdown Editor to Write Documentation
Within each sprint branch, product managers write and update documentation using Markdown. Apidog's Markdown editor is designed to be both powerful and beginner-friendly, offering a wide range of visual components that can be inserted with just a click. This makes it easy to create professional-looking documentation without extra effort.
Beyond standard Markdown styling, Apidog also provides several advanced features:
- Seamless linking to project endpoints/documents: You can insert references to endpoints or other documents directly into your content. This creates interconnected reference chains with smooth navigation, helping readers quickly find what they need—an essential feature for solving user problems efficiently.
- Rich resource insertion: Easily add icons, highlight blocks, tables, step-by-step guides, Mermaid diagrams, videos, and more. No need to search for external resources or memorize Markdown syntax—Apidog makes it simple to enhance your documentation visually and functionally.
3. Product and Operations Collaborate to Polish Documents
Once product managers finish drafting documentation in the sprint branch, the operations team steps in to review and polish it. Their goal is to improve clarity, accuracy, and usefulness by reading from the user's perspective and suggesting edits.
In the past, this was the most time-consuming part of the process. Collaboration relied heavily on back-and-forth explanations, manual edits, and version comparisons. Misunderstandings, conflicting versions, and incorrect changes often slowed everything down.
With Apidog, this process is now seamless:
- Product managers draft the document.
Operations colleagues are instantly notified and can make edits directly within the document. - Instant change notifications.
Every modification triggers a message card sent to the pre-configured IM group. Team members can click the notification link to jump straight into the updated document. - Easy version control.
The modification history lets you compare the draft against earlier versions, review changes, and decide whether to accept or revert edits. - Efficient iteration.
Product and operations teams repeat the cycle until the document is polished and finalized.
This streamlined workflow eliminates misunderstandings, keeps everyone aligned, and greatly improves collaboration efficiency.
4. Preparation and Review Before Publishing Documentation
To make sure documentation matches the actual product experience, we recommend capturing screenshots directly from the production environment. This not only ensures accuracy in what users see but also helps verify that newly released features are functioning as expected. After operations colleagues test the new features online and take screenshots, they insert them into the documentation.
Once all documents for the iteration are finalized:
- Operations confirm content – Completed documents are reviewed and selected, then submitted as an MR (merge request) to merge into the main branch.
- Administrator review – The operations manager or project administrators carefully check the content. If everything is accurate, they approve the merge.
- Merge and publish – After merging into the main branch, the updated documents immediately become visible to users in the published documentation.
This process ensures that users always have access to the latest, most accurate, and verified documentation.
Other Advantages of Using Apidog for Documentation Publishing
Beyond the core features we've already covered, Apidog offers additional capabilities that make it easier to create documentation sites tailored to your needs.
1. Customize Documentation Site Styles
You can configure the overall style of your documentation site to match your company’s branding. This includes setting a company logo, adding links to related resources, and aligning the site's look and feel with your product's tone.
For example, Apidog's own help documentation includes:
- A company logo in the upper left.
- Links to key company resources in the upper right.
- Direct access to open API documentation, which is especially valuable for developers.
2. One-Click, Zero-Maintenance Publishing
Publishing with Apidog is as simple as clicking the "Publish" button. Your documentation instantly goes online, hosted on an Apidog-provided domain—saving you time and maintenance effort.
For companies that want a more branded experience, Apidog also supports:
- Custom domains for hosting under your own company’s URL.
- Easy setup for site search, Algolia full-text search, Google Analytics integration, redirects, and other advanced features.
Best of all, these configurations don’t require engineering skills. Operators can set everything up by following the guided interface and help documentation.
3. SEO-Friendly Configurations
Apidog helps improve discoverability with built-in SEO settings:
- Automatically generated slugs for clean URLs that are easy to share.
- Advanced options for customizing slugs, metadata, and other SEO elements for individual documents.
Conclusion
The above outlines our specific practice of using Apidog to maintain product documentation. Beyond product guides, Apidog also makes it easy to manage help documentation, developer documentation, and API documentation in a unified style, with seamless links between them—creating a smoother experience for users.
If this approach fits your team's needs, we encourage you to give it a try and share it with your colleagues. We hope these practices help improve both the efficiency and quality of your documentation process.
