We've been building docs nav for ourselves
When you fire up your new CRM and want to add a lead, do you think "I need a tutorial"? Probably not. You just want to add the lead. Yet most docs sites greet you with a menu of Guides, Tutorials, and References, forcing you to pick a format before you can find what you came for. Navigation hasn't kept up with how people look for things. With AI assistants now handling lookup, navigation has narrowed to one job: helping readers who don't know what they're searching for. And we're failing them. After rebuilding docs nav at three B2B SaaS companies, I'll show why Technical Writers keep optimizing for ourselves — clean content types, single source of truth, internal taxonomies — and the cost our readers and our companies pay for it. You'll leave knowing what mistakes to avoid, how to decide when building new navigation, and with a flowchart for designing navigation that serves the people using your docs, not the people writing them.
Tomas Nosek leads the Scaled Customer Experience team at Apify, overseeing Support, Documentation, and Adoption. Over the past 10+ years he's led docs, customer education, and customer success teams at Kentico, Kontent.ai, and Apify — including three rebuilds of docs navigation, each one taught by the previous one's mistakes. Strong proponent of writing for the reader, even when it's inconvenient for the writer.