> if you spend your time writing great documentation, the product will suffer and nobody will use it
This is an unfortunate perspective. And I could say the opposite is true. If you don’t spend time writing great documentation, your product will suffer and nobody will use it.
Documentation gets neglected because developers don’t feel like doing it. If you are building a product for developers, documentation is critical.
if you spend your time making sure your product works but don’t write thorough documentation, it can become a breakout hit even though some hacker news commenters may complain about a lack of good documentation
if you spend your time writing great documentation, the product will suffer and nobody will use it