How Gravitee scales documentation across teams with GitBook
For Gravitee’s technical writing team, documentation isn’t just about helping users — it’s an important tool for accelerating sales cycles, reducing support burden, and creating incredible first impressions for prospects discovering the platform through search.
As an API management platform with multiple product lines and teams, Gravitee needed a documentation platform that could keep pace with rapid development — and promote company-wide collaboration.
We spoke with Gareth Brinn, Documentation Manager at Gravitee, about how GitBook transformed their approach to documentation and enabled collaboration at scale.
The challenge: plug-and-play over build-it-yourself
Competing with larger corporations, Gravitee needed to be strategic about where they invested engineering resources.
The team needed a solution that would work out of the box — with the flexibility to create a great documentation experience without the need for custom development.
Unlocking company-wide docs contributions
With several different feature teams — plus support and field teams — Gravitee has a lot of cross-departmental collaboration. GitBook’s intuitive interface made it easy for both technical and non-technical contributors to get involved in docs workflows.
“It helps every department — it’s just easy cross-collaboration. We don’t have to work with multiple tools. One tool does it all, and we don’t have to hold somebody’s hand through the documentation creation process. It’s made life very easy.”
Simplifying documentation workflows
One of the biggest benefits for Gravitee has been keeping the entire documentation process in one place — from drafting, to review, to publication.
“GitBook keeps it all centralized in one application. I’ve worked at corporations before where you had to use two or three different tools to get to publication, which is a lot of red tape. Keeping it in one place is great for us.”
This centralization extends to their review process as well. The team can easily share work-in-progress documentation with subject matter experts using a preview link, and get instant feedback.
Flexible workflows with Git Sync
While most contributors use GitBook’s visual editor, the team also appreciates the flexibility of Git Sync for those who prefer working in GitHub.
“Certain teams prefer to work in GitHub using Markdown, because they do everything in GitHub and want to keep it all in one application. So it’s great that we can use Git Sync to collaborate.”
The technical writing team handles the backend setup — creating spaces, configuring Git Sync, setting up change requests — so that contributors can focus purely on content without worrying about the technical details.
Documentation as a strategic sales tool
Beyond serving existing customers, Gravitee also uses its documentation for lead generation and sales enablement. The team works closely with their SEO specialist and use GitBook’s built-in SEO optimizations to ensure the documentation ranks well for key searches.
“When people Google ‘API management’ and land on our docs site, they see it’s easy to use, click ‘Contact Gravitee,’ and the whole journey starts. We use it for prospects, generating leads, and to reach people before our sales team does.”
The strategic approach is paying off. Gravitee has seen their documentation outperform competitors in search rankings and customer evaluations.
“We’d heard that we outranked a competitor. It shows that it is working — the processes we’re putting in place and GitBook’s hosting of our site.”
Gravitee’s documentation now serves as a point of entry that impresses prospective customers and accelerates the sales cycle for both organic and sales-qualified leads.
Responsive product development
One aspect that particularly impressed the Gravitee team is GitBook’s continuous innovation and responsiveness to customer feedback.
“With plug-and-play models, you’re often limited. But with GitBook, if it doesn’t exist the team builds it quickly. If we say we need something, even if it’s complex, a month later the GitBook team are like ‘Here’s version one, version two will be ready in two weeks’.”
Beyond the product itself, the team values GitBook’s support approach.
“We love how easy it is to work with the GitBook team. We put a question into the chat, somebody responds almost immediately. If there’s a feature that we want, they help us by either building the feature or showing us existing features and how they can help. GitBook has always been a great partner to us.”
Looking ahead: analytics and continuous improvement
While the team has focused on foundational documentation improvements, they’re excited about leveraging GitBook’s analytics capabilities more extensively in the future.
“Product managers are really excited by GitBook Insights — to understand how people are coming to the product, what they’re searching for, how they’re getting there. Once we’re happy with the foundational work, we’ll use Insights to pinpoint where we need to improve.”
For Gravitee, GitBook has become more than just a documentation platform — it’s the foundation that enables strategic documentation at scale, from prospect to customer, across a distributed team.
Ready to create documentation that scales with your team and supports your sales process? Get started for free or reach out to our team to see how GitBook’s powerful organization tools can handle even the most complex documentation needs.
→ How does GitBook handle SEO?
