Documentation as a way to build community

Your original DevRel hire probably wasn’t a developer advocate, it was whoever was already writing the docs. Lisa-Marie, community architect and DevRel leader at Intuit, joined the We Love Open Source podcast to make the case that documentation is the most overlooked form of community building, share why people don’t realize Intuit contributed Argo CD to the CNCF project, and explain why AI still can’t replace the humans at the center of open source.

When Lisa-Marie walks into a company to help build out a DevRel team, she doesn’t start with developer advocates. She goes straight for one specific group first, and her reasoning cuts against how most companies think about community building entirely. She’s seen the difference good documentation makes firsthand, and she’s blunt about how much harder that problem gets to solve once a company grows past a certain size.

Ask most developers which companies power the CNCF ecosystem, and Intuit probably isn’t the first name that comes to mind. Lisa-Marie makes the case that it should be, and the list of everyday products running on Kubernetes, Argo, and Prometheus underneath is longer than you’d expect.

AI keeps getting pitched as the fix for every gap in open source, including the documentation problem. Lisa-Marie isn’t buying it, at least not entirely, and her argument for why human judgment still has to sit at the center of the pipeline gets into territory a lot of AI conversations skip entirely.

Watch for these key takeaways from the interview:

• Docs teams are the original DevRel. Lisa-Marie says the quality of a project’s documentation often predicts whether its community survives, and she prioritizes doc writers when building DevRel teams from scratch.
• Intuit is a bigger open source contributor than people realize. Their team built and maintains Argo CD, now the third most popular project in the CNCF, along with Numaproj.
• AI can’t replace human judgment in open source. Clean data still requires people, and Lisa-Marie argues that diverse teams are essential to building responsible, human-centric AI.

Lisa-Marie also introduces the Numaproj mascot and the story behind the name, and shares her advice for anyone who assumes contributing to open source means becoming a maintainer. Watch the full episode to hear how she survives the We Love Open Source Hot Fix Minute.

Editor’s note: This episode was recorded in October 2025. AI is advancing quickly, and communities like Argo, along with companies like Intuit, continue to evolve their approach to the technology.

This article is adapted from The best kept secret in open source is hiding in the docs by All Things Open, and is republished with the author's permission.