TechDocs at Grab: Cultivating a culture of quality documentation

Summary

Grab’s TechDocs working group describes a two- to three-year effort to make high-quality documentation part of everyday engineering culture. Built on the Helix engineering platform and a Docs-as-Code workflow, TechDocs gives teams a central place to create, manage, and access technical content, while user research informs tool and process changes. The programme combines inventory-taking, policy, team enablement, and recurring measurement, using broad surveys and 1:1 observation to identify fragmented tools, weak ownership, search problems, and maintenance gaps. Research found that only 2% of engineers reported resolving 80–100% of on-call questions through documentation; later initiatives included an editor, writing training, practical workshops, and recognition tied partly to documentation quality and on-call-bot response accuracy. Planned work includes better navigation, training, feedback loops, and editing workflows.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Only 2% of surveyed engineers said that documentation resolved 80–100% of their on-call questions; 29% reported a 40–60% resolution range, and 25% reported 20–40%.

2. 2

   TechDocs Editor improvements were prioritised from user research, including better merge-request creation, conflict resolution, previewing, bulk migration, and clearer separation between TechDocs and the Wiki.

3. 3

   Training used info-typing guidelines and writing practices, followed by workshops where engineers revised their own user-facing documentation with feedback from Tech Content Developers.