The Code Sample That Already Knows You: Docs as Product and SDKs

Part of the Dev Tools for PMs series.

Stripe's docs embed your own API test key in their code samples, so the first thing you run just works - and they've treated documentation as a product since before their Series A. This episode covers the product around the API: docs as the developer onboarding flow, the Divio framework that splits documentation into four distinct kinds (tutorials, how-to guides, reference, explanation), docs-as-code, and why the SDK, not the API, is the interface developers actually love. Then the counter-case: docs can't rescue a confusing API, a stale SDK is worse than none, and docs page views are a vanity metric.