1 min lesson
Treat docs as a product with a funnel
Take this case and make the call: "The work-trial gives you docs access and a Slack channel. You want a high-signal, low-risk deliverable that demonstrates the role's named skills. What do you build and why does it fit the bar?"
Step 1 of 2
Treat docs as a product with a funnel
Docs have an onboarding funnel like any product: land, install, first success, second success, drop-off. Each step has friction you can measure and reduce. "Time to first running agent" is a real metric and shaving it is real DX work.
- Instrument where readers abandon the quickstart and treat that step as a bug.
- Measure time-to-first-success and drive it down release over release.
- Watch the support channel and forums for the same question asked twice - that's a docs gap, not a user error.
A tight, well-scoped docs fix - find a broken or stale example, verify the real behavior against source, ship the corrected page with a short note on how you confirmed it - is low-risk and high-signal. It shows taste, correctness instinct and source-reading in one artifact. It's exactly the kind of thing that lands on the work-trial bar without needing a flashy build.
If the loop gives you docs access and a Slack channel (the work-trial format), spend the first hour finding one concrete correctness bug and verifying the true behavior in the source. Open your presentation with "here's a claim in the docs, here's the source line that contradicts it, here's the fix." That sequence demonstrates the exact skill the JD names.