Support is a product surface
Help articles are not documentation you write once and forget. They are where people go when the product has already failed them. So we treat the help centre like a feature, with the same review bar.
Concretely, that means the articles are not in a third-party knowledge base with a rich text editor. They live in the repository, as typed content modules, ninety-three of them across fourteen categories: messages, calls, meetings, mailbox, money, notifications, account, policies and the rest. They are reviewed the way code is reviewed, they ship when a release ships, and a change to a feature and the change to the article describing it can be the same commit.
That last property is the entire argument. The failure mode of every help centre is not bad writing, it is drift: the product moves, the article does not, and now the page a frustrated person landed on is confidently describing a button that is no longer there. Keeping the words next to the code does not make drift impossible, but it makes it visible in the place where somebody is already looking.
Treating support as a surface changes what you measure, too. A help article that gets a lot of traffic is not a successful article. It is a report. It says a specific number of people could not work something out from the interface, went looking, and needed a paragraph of prose to recover. Sometimes prose is the right answer, because the thing genuinely is complicated. Often it is a label we got wrong, or a state we never explained, and the correct response is to fix the screen and let the article become quiet.
The other half of taking it seriously is reach. An answer in a language somebody does not read is not an answer, and the app itself offers eleven. Machine-translating the help centre into all of them, keeping those translations current as the English changes, and never letting a machine draft overwrite a phrase a person has approved, turned out to be a genuinely interesting engineering problem rather than a checkbox. We wrote it up separately.
The rule we keep coming back to: the moment someone opens the help centre, the product has already spent some of their patience. Everything after that is about spending as little more of it as possible.
