Documentation Investment Planning

Documenting a design-system component to full depth, across every category, for every component, up front is rarely affordable — teams that try either stall on documentation before shipping components or burn out maintaining docs nobody asked for yet. The common alternative — documenting unevenly by intuition — tends to over-invest in whatever's easiest or most interesting to write (usually code reference) while starving the categories that actually change how confidently people adopt and use the component (usually design guidance and content guidance). This skill applies Nathan Curtis' (EightShapes) component-documentation cost-vs-value framework and staged budget build-out from his 2023 Smashing Magazine design systems workshop, so documentation investment is a deliberate sequencing decision instead of a byproduct of what felt natural to write first.

Content Categories

Every piece of component documentation falls into one of six categories. Rate and sequence work at this level, not per individual doc page: