How to Set Your Team Up for Success

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How to Set Your Team Up for Success

We’ve all been there – you start creating a new article, topic, or documentation structure, only to realize halfway through that your approach isn’t working. Now you’re stuck: either leave it as it is and risk confusing your audience or go back and refine it. This can be frustrating, time-consuming, and difficult, but it’s necessary for success.

This is where our content lifecycle comes in. Among the many content cycle approaches, we’ve found this one works best. It consists of 5 steps: Plan, Author, Track, Publish and Engage. These describe the lifecycle that every piece of content goes through.

This is why the first step of planning is so important. Before jumping in and creating content, take a minute to clarify what you want to share and who it’s for. A little planning saves time in the end, and makes your content more effective.

Why Planning Matters

If you take a moment and think about what exactly you want to communicate and think about your audience, you’ll have a better picture of how you need to structure your documentation and your content.

For example, with user-focused help content, users will look for answers in a few different places. Each stage of their answer seeking increases user frustration, so you want to prevent them from having to move to the next one.

The planning phase is therefore crucial for the success of your documentation. If you don’t know what you want to communicate to users they won’t be able to find a solution to their problem in your documentation and then just end up in customer support.

Tips for Confluence You Can Use Right Away

Let’s explore some tips you can use immediately to improve content planning and avoid this scenario.

Define the purpose

Before writing, clarify your goal: What’s the purpose of this content?

Think about your audience and what they’re seeking to accomplish and what they need to do so. An article only serves one purpose, if it explains a concept, it should only explain the concept; if it’s documenting steps, it should focus only on that.

For example in a product documentation it helps to think backwards and ask questions like:

• What should your user do or be able to do after reading?
• What does your user need to know to accomplish this topic or article?
• What do they already know at this stage in the documentation?

Confluence Tip:

It’s 2025, and as Jensen Huang says:

AI is not going to take your jobs. The person who uses AI is going to take your job.

Atlassian Confluence has its own AI teammate called Atlassian Intelligence. It’s a feature available to premium and enterprise users only, and it can help you plan content before writing it. With Rovo, Atlassian has introduced a new product that allows you to create specialized agents, like a virtual teammate, to help you refine your content’s purpose by asking the right questions.

Structure for long term success

It’s best to break down the product into a structured hierarchy. From there, you create articles with defined types like instructions, concepts, etc. and also plan how to cross-reference them effectively.

Confluence Tip:

Confluence offers hundreds of page templates out of the box. You’re also able to create your own page templates with ease which makes Confluence very powerful to structure your content for success.

Plan for multiple audiences

Keep in mind that not all your users are the same. You probably have different user personas with different needs and requirements. If your content is meant for multiple audiences with different interests and expertise levels, you need to plan for these differences in advance.

Confluence Tip:

To serve multiple audiences, you’ll need features that display content dynamically based on the user or allow content reuse across your documentation. Unfortunately, Confluence has limited built-in support for these features. To explore what’s possible, check out our course about building Confluence for scale.

Expand Confluence with an app:

But to really serve multiple audiences while keeping the maintenance for your team low you should expand your Confluence site with apps like Scroll Documents for Confluence which for example can be enhanced with Variants for Scroll Documents.
Variants let you define content that is only shown under specific conditions. This is particularly helpful when you want to control the scope of content that gets published. Scroll Documents also supports different languages.

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This is just scratching the surface of why planning is so important when creating content.

Read the full article to learn everything about it.

Cheers!