Building docs like a product

Summary

Building Docs Like a Product 29 Jan, 2026 Stripe is famous for having some of the best product docs, largely because they are "designed to feel like an application rather than a traditional user manual". I spent much of the last week building and writing the docs for Scour, and I am quite proud of the results. Interactive DocsScour is a personalized content feed, not an SDK or API, so I started by asking myself what the equivalent of working code or copyable snippets is for this type of product. The answer: interactive pieces of the product, built right into the docs themselves. Scouring Hacker News for Hidden GemsThe guide for Hacker News readers is one of the sections I'm most proud of. When describing Scour to people, I often start with the origin story of wanting a tool that could search for posts related to my interests from the thousands submitted to HN that never make it to the front page. Built right into the guide is a live search bar that searches posts that have been submitted to HN, but that have not been on the front page. Try it out! You might find some hidden gems. The guides for Redditors, Substack readers, and arXiv readers also have interactive elements that let you easily search for subreddits or newsletters, or subscribe to any of arXiv's categories. Logged in users can subscribe to those feeds right from the docs. Show, Don't TellEvery time I went to explain some aspect of Scour, I first asked myself if there was a way to use a working example instead. On the Interests page, I wanted to explain that the topics you add to Scour can be any free-form text you want. Every time you load the page, this snippet loads a random set of interests that people have added on Scour. You can click any of them to go to the page of content related to that topic and add that interest yourself. While explaining how Scour recommends other topics to you, I thought what if I just included an actual topic recommendation for logged in users? (Graphic Design was actually...