I was reviewing a startup’s product documentation last week, and something struck me as fundamentally wrong. The internal API docs were beautifully formatted, meticulously detailed, and would make any technical writer proud. Meanwhile, their customer-facing mobile app felt like it was designed by engineers who’d never actually used a smartphone.
This isn’t just bad prioritization—it’s a symptom of a deeper problem in how we think about product development. When teams spend more time polishing internal artifacts than the actual user experience, we’ve lost sight of what really matters in building successful products.
Look, I get it. Internal documentation feels controllable. It’s a safe space where we can apply our engineering mindset without dealing with messy user feedback or unpredictable market reactions. But as The Qgenius Golden Rules of Product Development remind us, successful products must reduce users’ cognitive load. No amount of beautiful internal documentation will save a product that confuses its actual customers.
Remember when Apple launched the original iPhone? They didn’t spend months perfecting their internal development processes. Instead, they obsessed over every pixel of the user interface, every animation, every interaction. Steve Jobs famously delayed the launch to replace the plastic screen with glass because it felt better to users. That’s the kind of prioritization that creates legendary products.
Here’s the brutal truth: Your customers don’t care about your internal documentation. They care about whether your product solves their problem elegantly and efficiently. As product managers, we need to constantly ask ourselves: Are we spending time on things that actually matter to our users, or are we just making ourselves feel productive?
This isn’t to say documentation isn’t important. Clear internal docs help teams scale and maintain consistency. But they should serve the product, not the other way around. When documentation becomes an end in itself, we’ve lost the plot.
The most successful teams I’ve worked with maintain what I call the 「external focus ratio.」 They deliberately spend at least 80% of their polishing time on customer-facing elements versus internal artifacts. This forces them to constantly confront the real product experience rather than hiding behind process excellence.
So next time you’re tempted to spend another week perfecting those API docs, ask yourself: Would this time be better spent watching real users struggle with our product? The answer might be uncomfortable, but it’s usually the right one.