Launching FastSpring’s developer portal

TECHNICAL WRITING

Problem

Although a large portion of FastSpring’s users were developers integrating the software in their websites, FastSpring had no user-facing resources for them. This caused significant strains on customer retention and customer-facing teams.

How I addressed it

In order to reduce the strain on colleagues and customers, I:

  • Gathered qualitative and quantitative data to identify what resources developers needed 

  • Proposed launching a dev center to executives while outlining pain points it would address and supporting data

  • Developed a 6-month plan to adopt a content management system and build out developer documentation

  • Lead the cross-functional implementation of the dev center while owning the development of all new content

3 key resources within
1 new hub

Modernized API reference

Working with engineers, I outlined a plan to launch an automated API reference in accordance to user feedback and adopt the docs-as-code maintenance methodology. Following implementation, I led biweekly meetings to continuously expand the API reference, including 6 new endpoints for a newly acquired company.

Each API doc included comprehensive parameters and interactive elements that developers could use to test the APIs

Each API category contained an overview page explaining how associated endpoints worked and how to use associated parameters

New JavaScript library docs

After researching internal resources, I scoped and produced the first comprehensive documentation of FastSpring’s JavaScript library.

The information architecture that I developed continues to be used by FastSpring today.

Revamped webhook guides 

I restructured inherited webhook content to increase discoverability and added JSON code samples to make the resources more comprehensive. As a result, the traffic on these pages skyrocketed.

The impact:

This developer portal was immediately adopted by colleagues and end-users and remains a valuable asset to the company to this day

Adopted by 5,000 developers

The immediate adoption following the launch led to long-term investment in maintaining the quality of the resource

Reduced support ticket volume

In turn, this improved the support team’s average response times and ratings, retaining more customers

Long-lasting content strategy

The information architecture that I developed is still used by the growing technical writing team and integrates seamlessly with Marketing resources to this day