From sales brochure to how-to

Picture buying a new car, having an issue, and opening the owner's manual to find a sales pitch and a catalog of aftermarket accessories. That's what the developer portal I inherited felt like. I was the only developer docs writer at Trustly, and I was hired specifically to fix their North America developer documentation.

APIs, SDKs, and integration guides were jumbled together. Steps were duplicated or missing, prerequisites were nowhere to be found, and it was difficult to determine what task should be completed first. It was organized around Trustly products, not around what a developer needed to do to implement Trustly.

The platform didn't help. I had to write custom React to implement tiles, tabs, and dropdowns. A "docs-as-code" workflow was true in spirit only. Peer reviews and GitHub linting were unnecessarily difficult.

Tool evaluation. I compared Fern, Docusaurus, GitBook, and Storyblok, which our European team used. Storyblok is a visual CMS, great for marketing content but not built for docs. Fern won on ease of use, and it solved what ReadMe couldn't. I used Plaid, Stripe, and Adyen as benchmarks for information architecture, API quality and completeness, and what they offer developers beyond the docs, such as AI assistants, LLM-friendly content, and raw Markdown versions.

The structure. The early plan organized the portal by product. I fought for tasks instead. Developers integrating a payment product don't need to be sold; they need to get it working. I walked senior leaders through the reasoning, and they agreed.

Fern's team ran the migration scripts, I reviewed the content, and I owned the information architecture. Their support, during and after, was excellent.

What surprised me was how fast it went. Management expected the new portal in June 2026. Work started in January and wrapped up in March, three months early. The only real snag was internal: design support was thin, and developer docs were new to the people assigned. I ended up working with Fern directly on the design.

Daily views roughly doubled, from about 175 a day before the move to 350 to 376 after. Most visitors landed on the new Get Started and API pages, which is where I wanted them. Fern's built-in AI assistant averaged close to 100 visits a day, and Fern's dashboard showed it resolving 70 to 80 percent of user questions.

Like a car owner's manual, the new Trustly North America developer portal avoids the sales pitch and tells developers what they need to do to get moving.