Have you ever wanted to explore a new place? Maybe it’s an international destination or a wilderness area you haven’t had a chance to visit yet.

In your preparation for this adventure, you’d likely investigate the possibility of hiring a guide. Maybe it’s a tour guide to show you the secrets of a new city, a backpacking expert to safely take you through the backcountry, or a digital “guide” for a park you are visiting.

Whatever the case, guides can deliver a better experience wherever you go.

But there are cases when a guide doesn’t make much sense. Building software is one of them.

I think we rely too much on guides. Instead, we need to be focusing on building trails.

Let me share why.

Team-Building Exercise

For Team-Building this week, ask your team what they think of your wiki. Is it well-organized? Do your docs help people accomplish their daily work? Do you have outdated guides that need to be reviewed?

After talking to your team, look at the analytics for each page your team owns. When was it last viewed (besides yourself a few moments ago)? When was the last time it was edited? Who tends to look at it if it has regular viewers?

Then, develop a plan to build at least one "trail" through your documentation. It doesn't need to be too long, either. Even consolidating existing guides into a singular page with links to each step of the process can be a huge win.

At Vouch, we recently did this for service deployments. We consolidated all of the various How-To guides and laid them out very easily so that any engineer wanting to get their service into production had a trail to follow. We've already seen this guide cut down times to get services to production, but also less churn and frustration with the process.
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Keep doing this iteratively for a while and you'll see your docs become more helpful and more easy to maintain in a few short weeks.

Here are some more resources from me to help you build better teams!​

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