As a new member of the SaltStack documentation team, I quickly identified that the installation guide for our core product at SaltStack needed an overhaul. It received a lot of negative feedback from customers and sales engineers for being difficult to use.

To make matters worse, it was also difficult to maintain, requiring several hours to update manually every time the software was released.

Over 3 months, I collaborated with a team of technical writers, site reliability engineers, and subject matter experts to overhaul the installation guide. We focused on researching pain points with customers to improve the accuracy and usability of the core content. We also implemented a new theme and automated the CI/CD pipeline for package delivery and publishing.

Our improvements had several positive results, including:

• Average end-user satisfaction scores immediately improved by 32% in before-and-after surveys.
• The number of end-users giving the lowest satisfaction score possible dropped to zero.

We also reduced the estimated release cycle time by 56-95 human resource hours. At 3 releases a year, this translated to a time savings of 285 hours annually, freeing up resources for other important business initiatives.