How Vellum uses Promptless to draft over 50% of their doc updates

Vellum has a flexible product that serves both technical and non-technical users, and docs were a constant uphill battle. After adopting Promptless 6 months ago, Vellum significantly reduced the effort needed to write great docs. Promptless's automatically generated doc updates made it much easier for feature-owners to contribute directly to docs, and today, over 50% of new doc updates come directly from Promptless.

Act I: Scaling Support Before Promptless

Time and again, Vellum hit roadblocks whenever it came to keeping docs up to date.

Their engineering team shipped new features every day. Engineers weren't experts on customer-facing docs, so they'd hand off features to a "docs owner". Important context always got lost in those transitions. Docs would get delayed, and customers would get affected.

At the same time, Vellum's high-touch support style meant they had tons of Slack Connect channels with users. Customers kept asking questions in those channels, from troubleshooting help to guidance on building specialized use-cases. Vellum's product team was highly-responsive, but they were answering the same questions, again and again.

They knew that covering these troubleshooting and use-case guides in their docs would be better for their customers, but the heavy context switching to go from supporting customers to writing docs context meant it was always deferred for later.

Vellum needed a way to reduce the cycle from feature development and customer support to documentation publishing, so that they could scale their product velocity and customer base without compromising onboarding and customer experience.

Act II: Promptless in Action

When Promptless got onboarded, it read through and learned from all of Vellum's existing docs, building up its own Product Ontology and Style Guide. That meant that Promptless was ready whenever Vellum needed doc updates, equipped with knowledge about Vellum's existing products and how their team wrote docs.

• Proactive, comprehensive coverage: Promptless not only created changelog entries, but scanned and updated every relevant section of the docs to identify updates. It would even proactively find and fix missing updates or existing inconsistencies across older docs.

• Detailed examples: Code snippets and UI walkthroughs were quickly auto‑generated from Slack snippets and screenshots. This meant that users could sidestep the API Reference and instantly get what they need.

• Customer feedback to docs: Promptless automatically turns casual troubleshooting tips and questions answered in Slack Connect customer support channels into polished examples in Vellum's docs.

Quick stat: 54% of Vellum’s docs PRs in the last month originated from Promptless suggestions.

Dropping screenshots into Slack and letting Promptless interpret them—ordering images, explaining around them—has been a game-changer for our UI tutorials. It genuinely feels like magic.
— Aaron Levin, Founding Solutions Engineer, Vellum

Act III: Turning Docs into a Team Sport

Since Promptless learns how to write by reading existing articles, any engineer at Vellum could request docs updates from Promptless for a feature they owned, and get back new and edited articles. Since Promptless had a prior understanding of Vellum's docs, its suggestions required minimal edits, and the cycle between feature completion and doc readiness was dramatically reduced.

• Democratized contributions: Now, 60% of Vellum’s product & engineering team interacts with Promptless to draft doc updates every month.

• Tighter feedback loops: Getting feature-owners directly involved in doc updates mean that details don't get lost in transition, and things actually get done.

• Normalized style: Promptless enforces Vellum’s tone and structure automatically, removing the need for rigid style checklists.

Before, only a docs‑owner or someone steeped in our style guide could update docs. Now Promptless standardizes everything, so anyone on the team can contribute.
— Aaron Levin, Founding Solutions Engineer, Vellum

What’s Next

Vellum is always exploring new ways for Promptless to help improve their customer experience. The latest dream use-case is getting Promptless to drive personalized summaries of product updates for key clients, since Promptless is already well-versed in product updates and customer use-cases. Coming soon!