Channable started as a feed management tool and grew into a platform that helps thousands of e-commerce businesses and agencies distribute products across thousands of channels worldwide. Over more than a decade of that growth, so did their documentation, expanding into 500+ highly customized pages across six languages.

But that growth brought complexity, and began slowing the team down.

With just two technical writers and limited resources, even small updates took a lot of effort. While the English-language documentation was improving daily, translation efforts struggled to keep pace — putting the team at risk of delivering an uneven experience across markets.

We spoke with Sofie Penn-Slater, Channable’s Customer Education Lead, about the team’s migration to GitBook — and the knowledge gaps they closed along the way.

When maintenance mode isn’t enough

As Channable’s product expanded, so did the expectations placed on its documentation. It needed to move as fast as feature releases, support multiple languages, and increasingly needed to integrate with AI-powered support tools.

The existing setup created bottlenecks. Only the technical writers fully understood the underlying structure, meaning they were the only ones who could confidently manage edits. And that limited collaboration across the wider customer education team and slowed iteration.

At the same time, documentation wasn’t just being read by humans anymore. It also needed to connect with AI systems (like Intercom’s Fin) that rely on structured, accessible content to generate accurate answers.

They weren’t just publishing a new docs site — they were redesigning their docs structure from the ground up.

Why GitBook

When choosing a new platform for their help center, the team wanted a tool that would help them move faster without sacrificing structure or quality.​

Collaboration needed to be simple and safe, allowing writers to work independently while giving others a controlled way to contribute. Built-in version control, clear edit tracking, and easy rollback were important, along with support for translation workflows and integration with AI tools such as Intercom’s Fin.

"GitBook was the obvious choice. Having used it in a previous company, I was well aware of the quality and comprehensiveness of the product, and that the GitBook team genuinely put their customers first. They'll work with us to find solutions, and implement fixes and new features with a speed that few other companies rival. Other tools are often an afterthought of ticketing software or chatbot software, whereas GitBook does one thing, incredibly well: it makes creating product documentation fun."

Equally important was creating a true product documentation experience — structured, easy to navigate, and focused on helping users understand the product rather than getting lost in a maze of FAQ-style content.

Migrating to GitBook

Migrating 500+ pages in six languages isn’t simple — but GitBook allowed the team to smoothly switchover. Despite maintaining essentially the same layout structure for 10 years, the redesign didn’t generate a single negative response.

"Migrating our existing help center content to GitBook was fast and required minimal reformatting. This made getting started simple and gave us more time to consider our documentation structure and how to better group related topics. The redirects and broken links functionality makes it easy to identify and resolve links that customers are struggling to access. We felt truly supported by GitBook's knowledgeable support team! Whenever we had an issue or a question they were quick to respond and super helpful."

That outcome mattered. Documentation is deeply tied to user trust, and long-time customers are often the first to notice when something changes.

Migrating to GitBook helped the team strengthen that trust by continuing to deliver a first-class documentation experience to their customers.

AI adoption and new insights

Migrating to GitBook instantly unlocked AI search and Assistant functionality for Channable's customers, who began using it immediately to find answers faster and navigate documentation with less friction. These interactions surfaced valuable insights into how users phrase questions, where confusion exists, and what information they seek most frequently.

"Gitbook’s AI agent is a huge time-saver. When you migrate 500+ articles, you're bound to have some outdated docs. Since their AI agent learns from how we write and format articles, it can tidy and weave in missing information in our brand voice in a couple prompts. We're a small team, so the time saved really adds up. AI logs and reporting also give us visibility into what interests customers and/or what they're struggling with. That isn't just used to improve our docs - it helps us build a case for meaningful UX improvements in our product."

Previously, those patterns were harder to observe. Now, documentation isn’t just serving answers — it’s generating feedback for the team too.

As AI tools increasingly rely on structured documentation to provide accurate responses, having clean, well-organized, and accessible content becomes critical. The move positioned Channable to support AI-powered assistance without sacrificing accuracy or consistency.

Documentation that scales with their product

Today, Channable’s documentation team operates differently. Updates move faster, collaboration has increased, and the help center is structured to support both human readers and AI systems. But most importantly, documentation no longer feels like a burden of maintenance.

As the team puts it: “GitBook makes creating and maintaining product documentation fun”.

For a two-person team managing hundreds of pages across multiple languages, that shift is huge, and ensures the documentation can scale as confidently as the product itself.

For teams managing complex, multilingual documentation with limited resources, the infrastructure behind your docs matters as much as the content itself. Learn how GitBook can help.