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Creating solutions

Building great Coda docs

When building a product, the first step is to focus on the person you’re building for ー and especially their problem / pain point that you’ll solve for. From there, you can ensure the product delivers on your user’s needs. A Coda doc can become as powerful as an app, and we often treat our docs like products. So put on your PM 🎩, and let’s learn how to build an awesome doc!

High-level questions

For Coda docs, what’s awesome is that you can write

product specs / PRDs⁠

(here’s an

example PRD⁠

) within the same place that you prototype and build the solution. When creating a doc ー especially one that will eventually feel like an app ー we suggest beginning with answering the following questions.

Who will use this doc?

What are they trying to do?

What is their problem / pain point with how they are doing it today?

What actions do you want users taking?

What are people hoping to get out of this doc?

Specific user needs

Beyond answering the high-level questions, you can begin focusing on specific user interactions with your solution. There are two common frameworks when writing and designing these interactions:

User story⁠

and

Jobs to be done⁠

(JTBD).

User story

⁠

User Stories And The Alternatives - Scrum Inc

⁠

For example: As the VP of Product, I would like to see all upcoming features we’re launching, to achieve alignment within our team to ship the feature and so that we can coordinate with marketing for the biggest impact communication.

Jobs to be done (JTBD)

⁠

Jobs To Be Done Framework. Scrapping the persona and approaching… | by Alex Jupiter | Make Us Proud | Medium

⁠

For example: When I add a new task to our team’s project, I want to produce focused and amazing work, so I can ensure I complete my work on time and not get lost in the general project plan.

Launching the doc

Since you’ve already written all the product specs and user stories / JBTD in your doc, you can repurpose all this great content for promotion to get people excited about using your doc and for guidance to give users confidence in navigating the doc and taking the right actions (like help text). This content normally shows up in two places:

Landing page: Welcome users to the doc. Here’s some more guidance on what to include.

Design a delightful doc - Welcoming⁠

Help text: Where the user should go and what they should do. This usually exists above and around where you’d like users to take action. You can find this in almost all in doc templates (type / to see some examples).

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.