In the relentless cycle of software development, support tickets often get dismissed as noise. But as developer relations veteran Moore argues, they represent an unsung goldmine for understanding how users actually interact with your product. "Every devrel should read support tickets and the answers, even if they don't respond to them," Moore writes, emphasizing their value across channels from Zendesk to community forums like Slack and Discord.

These raw user interactions expose sharp edges in the product—frustration points where workflows break and confusion reigns. Moore outlines a systematic process to mine this ore:

  1. Read Everything: Forward every generic issue to yourself after a week, giving support teams time to craft solutions.
  2. Audit the Response: If no solution exists after a week, re-forward the ticket. If one does, share the link with the devrel team.
  3. Synthesize to Q&A: Convert the resolved ticket into a clear, generic question-and-answer format.
  4. Publish to Forums: Post the Q&A in a community forum.
  5. Escalate to Docs: For repeated issues, create standalone technical documentation and notify support and sales teams.

"A forum post, because it has that timestamp, doesn't have to be [accurate forever]. It has to be true for that moment in time."

This forum-first approach is deliberate. Unlike official documentation intended for permanence, forum posts carry inherent time-stamped context. This "disposable accuracy" imposes minimal future maintenance costs while immediately sharing valuable insights. It also boosts SEO and provides training data for large language models (LLMs) that thrive on Q&A formats.

The process yields strategic advantages beyond content creation. By tracking recurring issues, devrels gain unfiltered insight into product friction points, enabling them to create high-impact tutorials, videos, and examples that address real user struggles. "If 10 folks don't understand how to use feature X and cared enough to write in, you should probably document feature X," Moore notes.

However, this approach isn't a silver bullet. It requires significant time investment and thrives best in smaller, agile organizations where devrels can closely follow support workflows. Used in isolation, it can't compensate for gaps in core documentation architecture. Yet when implemented effectively, it creates a virtuous cycle: reduced support burden as users self-serve through improved discoverability, while support teams gain reusable resources to deflect repetitive queries.

In the end, treating support tickets as raw material for documentation transforms them from operational overhead into strategic assets—turning user frustration into product clarity, one resolved ticket at a time.