Why We Built Prodcat: From Chaos to Clarity

Maintaining product documentation was eating our time and sanity. We built Prodcat to fix that — and here’s how it changed everything. It’s the story of moving from a state of constant, low-grade chaos to one of structure and clarity.

The Breaking Point: A Cascade of Small Problems

Before Prodcat, our documentation process was a fragile system held together by manual effort and wishful thinking. We were juggling dozens of Markdown files across multiple product lines. The workflow was not just inefficient; it was a constant source of errors.

• Inconsistent Information: A price update meant hunting down every instance of that price across multiple files. A changed feature name could linger in old documents for months.
• Broken Navigation: Every new product required manually adding links to category pages and navigation bars. It was tedious and incredibly easy to miss a link or create a broken one.
• Onboarding Nightmare: Bringing a new team member up to speed was a challenge. There was no single source of truth, just a collection of files with their own quirks and histories.
• Slow to Scale: Launching a new product or a new product line was a monumental task that involved more copy-pasting than innovation.

The collective weight of these "small" problems was immense. It was death by a thousand paper cuts.

The 'Aha!' Moment: Documentation as Data

The turning point came when we stopped thinking about our documentation as a collection of static pages and started thinking about it as data. Our products had names, descriptions, prices, and features. This was structured information, so why were we managing it in an unstructured way?

We asked ourselves: What if our documentation could be generated from a single, canonical source of truth?

This simple question was the genesis of Prodcat. We envisioned a tool that would take a simple JavaScript array of product objects and handle the rest. No more Markdown files to wrangle. No more broken links to fix. Just clean, consistent, and automatically generated documentation.

Our Core Principles in Building Prodcat

That vision evolved into a philosophy that guided Prodcat's development. We built it around three core principles:

1. Centralize Your Data: There should only be one place to update product information. The products.js file became our single source of truth. Change a product's name there, and it changes everywhere on the site.
2. Automate the Boring Parts: Manual, repetitive tasks are a recipe for errors and burnout. Prodcat was designed to automate the entire process of creating product pages, directory pages, and navigation.
3. Focus on What Matters — Your Products: Developers and product managers should spend their time building and improving products, not wrestling with documentation tools. Prodcat frees them to do just that.

The Transformation: From Chaos to Clarity

Implementing Prodcat internally was transformative. The chaos of managing dozens of individual files was replaced by the clarity of a single, well-structured data source.

• Updates became trivial. A feature change now requires editing a single line in one file.
• Consistency is now guaranteed. Every product page follows the same template, ensuring a uniform and professional user experience.
• Scaling is now effortless. Adding a new product is as simple as adding a new object to an array.

Whether you’re documenting hardware, software, or services, Prodcat is designed to help you scale your documentation without sacrificing clarity or your team's sanity. It's the tool we wish we'd had from the start.