Governance, Frankenstein Docs, And The Very Expensive Cost Of Letting Content Run Wild

A customer disaster story with a very modern lesson for tech writers and documentation leaders

A few years ago, while consulting with a financial services software company, I got pulled into one of those situations that starts with “a customer is upset” and ends with leadership acting stunned that documentation quality might affect customer retention.

Duh! 😒

The company sold an automated mortgage approval system to lenders. This wasn’t some whimsical app that guessed your aura or matched your leadership style to a breakfast pastry (<— that’s not a thing, yet). It was serious software used in highly regulated environments, where customers needed clear, trustworthy guidance to deploy, configure, and use it correctly.

One customer had had enough. ✋🏼

They’d spent a long time (and wasted a lot of money) trying to make sense of the material the vendor had provided. And “provided” is generous at best.

What they’d actually received was less a set of docs and more a content yard sale assembled by well-meaning people who’d apparently never met a governance policy. There were formal docs, some of which may even have been accurate. There were PDFs from marketing, training materials, spreadsheets from internal teams, reference docs, bug notes, release notes, future roadmap tidbits, links to files marooned in SharePoint, and yes, emails.

All of it had been bundled into one giant zip file, as if customers enjoy panning for truth in a river of miscellaneous corporate debris.

They do not.

After several frustrating meetings, the customer used the cancellation clause in their contract and walked away. They also threatened a lawsuit for breach of contract. Then the financial services press got wind of it, and other lenders who’d bought the same software also started to rethink their choices. Leadership panicked, which was understandable.

Because I was there to help the company mature its doc practices, I got sent onsite to find out what had gone wrong and help stop the bleeding. 🩸