Seven pages nobody wanted to write

Customers trying to find out whether their product was still supported had to piece it together from scattered pages, PDFs and sales conversations. A VP wrote the brief — objectives, scope, deliverables, named stakeholders across five teams — and benchmarked the structure against a competitor's version.

It was assigned to my manager, reassigned to my lead, and reassigned again to me. I was the third owner.

The source data didn't exist yet. Product management was still assembling the lifecycle table while the pages were being built, and the requester was in and out of the process for four months.

Waiting for complete information would have meant shipping nothing.

I published in stages instead of waiting for the set. Product Security and the Vulnerability Disclosure Policy went live first, because they didn't depend on the table. The rest followed as the data arrived.

I ran the review rather than waiting to be reviewed. Preview links went out repeatedly, each time with an explicit note on what was and wasn't final — “They are far from final, but I'm trying to get the basic structure in place before we double-check links and other details.” Telling people what to ignore is what makes early reviews useful.

I raised the details nobody had asked about. Which columns the lifecycle table should carry once the release-article column was dropped. How the footer CTA would behave on the upgrade page after publishing. And the one that mattered most: “We should double-check the official page names, URL slugs, and subtitles to make sure they all align well.”

I wrote it like a person. End-of-life documentation is the driest category of content there is, and the reviewer's response to the draft was not about structure: “omg jeremy hahahahaha the ‘goodbyes are hard’”

Seven live, navigable pages on vizrt.com, from the product lifecycle overview through to the vulnerability disclosure policy.

Plus the follow-on work the project generated in marketing automation — new copy for the linked form page, and the changes it needed once the end-of-life page went live and started pointing at it.

Partway through, the requester left for leave and handed me her stakeholder directly: “going to connect you with Franz directly for while I am off to agree and push these live.” Then, at close: “A huge thanks to you Jeremy, I know this one was a beast.”

These pages are still live, and you can open every one of them below.