Organization & Role
Heap is a digital analytics platform. As their founding documentation strategist, I’m responsible for the user experience, information architecture, content strategy, and all content within the Help Center and developer/API docs.
Project
While brainstorming ways I could make our docs more helpful for prospects and new customers, I noticed several competitors and industry innovators had prominent ‘What is [product]?’ FAQs, including Slack and Mixpanel. Inspired, I took it upon myself to write one for Heap.
Problem
Heap’s most daunting competitor is not a rival business; it’s apathy. Most companies aren’t aware that it’s possible to automatically capture all past data with a single code snippet, and are put off by the amount of work it takes to embed a new product analytics tool in their stack, then have to wait until enough time has elapsed to have collected meaningful data to inform their decisions.
Talking to my colleagues in Sales and Success, I found that explaining what exactly Heap does to prospects is a common pain point; the suggestion of a ‘What is Heap?’ FAQ was met with a “why don’t we have this already?” response.
The development of this FAQ also turned into an opportunity to align cross-functional teams on our Heap elevator pitch, which resulted in updates to our writing guide and several other articles.
Approach
To put together an outline and gather notes, I did the following:
- Sought out and reviewed competitor and industry leader versions of this FAQ to see what they did well that we could learn from. Slack had one of the best ones, so I based my initial template of the FAQ off of theirs.
- Read as much of our customer-facing marketing and sales materials as I could to find explanations that would fit this FAQ. Several of the key terms from these materials were incorporated in the final draft, and also resulted in updates to our writing guide.
- Broadcast what I was working on internally via our #heap-writers channel and asked folks to share their Heap elevator pitch so I could get the words right – this also provided an opportunity for Heaple to learn from one another and collectively improve our pitches.
Below you’ll see the earliest version of this FAQ draft, which consisted of a cobblestone of copy-pasted content from different resources along with notes to myself and doc links I felt belonged there.
Once I had the bare bones of what to write, I gathered select team members to get their input on what should fill in the gaps. These conversations illuminated differences in the purpose of the FAQ as well as the typical elevator pitch for Heap. For example, Sales Engineering leaned towards a more thorough, technical explanation of how our product outperforms competitors, while Marketing preferred a high-level, solutions-focused approach.
Since this was meant to be a lightweight, easy-to-read FAQ for someone brand-new to Heap, I opted to keep it as non-technical and straightforward as possible and link out to more technical FAQs. The sentence that received the most revision was the first line under the “How does Heap work” subheader, which after much back-and-forth, was ultimately finalized as:
“Heap automatically captures all user interactions in your app, then organizes this data for you to answer questions, run experiments, and explore your data to unearth insights.”
Some key word choices in this sentence:
✅ Automatically captures vs. autocapture: autocapture is a marketing term that we use all over the docs, which is fine for customers who are already familiar with it. During previous rounds of user testing, I learned that this term can come across as technical to some non-technical folks, so I opted for the most straightforward, layman’s version.
✅User interactions vs. events: user interactions felt more conversational and encompassed many types of actions, such as clicks, taps, touches, screenviews, form selections, and more.
✅Organizes this data for you: ultimately, this felt like the most universally accessible phrasing, plus the technical details are already documented in the guide linked directly below this line.
Outcome
After several rounds of revision with team members (including both founders), the final version received the Marketing, Product, and Sales sign-off as our official explanation of Heap. Just in case the copy in the published version changes, here’s the version that I wrote about in this portfolio piece:
See the current version: What is Heap?
This FAQ was published in May 2020 and quickly became popular, often ranking in the top 20 most-viewed out of 250 docs. Members of Sales and Success shared it with prospects and new account owners as a way to get started, and it received consistently positive feedback. It continues to be a living document that evolves along with our overall marketing messaging.
