How Hackmamba helped GBG Loqate build best-in-class developer documentation

Key outcomes

• Ran a full developer experience audit across the Loqate website, product, and documentation before changing a single word
• Resolved structural inconsistencies across an information architecture that had no clear user journey
• Replaced an overwhelming homepage with a clean three-step entry point for developers
• Completed a support documentation migration the internal team had been working toward for years
• Kept delivery on track through a mid-project leadership change on the client side

Company snapshot

GBG Loqate is a global data quality business. Its platform verifies addresses, emails, phone numbers, and bank account details for businesses across e-commerce, finance, logistics, and more. Developers integrate Loqate to improve checkout conversion, prevent failed deliveries, and keep data clean at the point of capture. GBG Loqate sits alongside GBG GO under the same company, GBG. We also built GBG GO's documentation from scratch before launch. You can read that story here.

• Industry: Data quality / SaaS
• Company size: 1,001-5,000 employees
• Location: Chester, United Kingdom
• Use case: Documentation consistency, information architecture, support content migration
• Products: Address Capture, Address Verify, Email Validation, Phone Validation, Bank Validation

The situation

Most devtools companies reach a point where their documentation covers everything but guides nothing. Every service is documented. Every endpoint has a reference page. The content is accurate. But a developer landing on it for the first time has no clear path to follow and ends up reading three different sections trying to figure out where to start.

GBG Loqate recognized this in their own docs and brought us in to work on it. Their team had built thorough documentation across a product that covers address capture, address verification, email validation, phone validation, bank validation, and integrations with Shopify, Salesforce, Adobe Commerce, Microsoft Dynamics, BigCommerce, and Shopware. The coverage was there. What it needed was a structure that matched how a developer actually moves through an integration, from first API call to production.

The documentation had also grown service by service over time, which meant the information architecture reflected the internal product structure rather than the developer's path through it. A developer hitting the homepage was presented with multiple starting points simultaneously, with no signal about which one to take first.

Alongside the documentation work, GBG Loqate had a migration they wanted to complete. Years of support content was living outside the live docs and needed to be brought into the main documentation system. This was a large, detail-heavy task that had been on the roadmap for some time. They needed a team that could take full ownership of it and see it through.

The audit

We start every project the same way: a full developer experience audit before we write or change a single thing.

The first thing they did was audit our documentation from an outside perspective and highlighted areas that needed addressing - Jamie Coleman, Senior Developer Advocate, GBG Loqate

On this project the audit covered three layers: the GBG Loqate website, the Loqate product itself, and the documentation. Understanding how a developer discovers the product, what they expect when they land on it, and what mental model they build before they ever open the docs shapes every structural decision we make after.

Including the website and the tool in the audit was relevant in understanding the product itself and the audience that will be consuming the new and improved documentation. - Gergely, documentation manager, Hackmamba

What the audit confirmed was that the documentation architecture had scaled with the product feature by feature. Each service section was solid in isolation. The problem was at the navigation and information architecture level: there was no single thread a developer could follow from getting started to completing an integration.

Picking one path and building everything around it

Loqate has five core services, nine integrations, an API reference, platform guides, and a help center. When documentation covers that much ground, every section feels equally important from inside the product. The result, without a deliberate decision about hierarchy, is that developers land in the docs and cannot tell what to read first.

Working on the documentation of comprehensive tools like Loqate often makes it challenging to pick a path because there are too many things you are tempted to highlight. Cutting through the noise to create a clear path can make the most difference." - Gergely, documentation manager, Hackmamba

We built the entire documentation around one entry point. Get your API key. Make your first call. Parse the response. Three steps that take a developer from zero to a working result. From there, every product section follows in the order a developer reaches for it during an actual integration.

The homepage became the most visible expression of this. One clear starting point, one question answered upfront: where do I begin?

Completing the migration

The support content migration was a large, methodical piece of work. Hundreds of support pages needed to be reviewed for accuracy, consolidated where there was duplication, and checked for broken links before anything could move into the live docs.

GBG Loqate's team had been working toward this migration, but completing it alongside ongoing product work required dedicated ownership that was hard to sustain internally. We took that ownership and finished it.

A specific acknowledgment goes to Manish on the GBG Loqate side, who secured the project extension that made delivering the migration possible.

Thanks a lot to Manish for pulling off the extension before his departure so we could deliver the migration." - Gergely, documentation manager, Hackmamba

When leadership changed mid-project

Leadership on the GBG Loqate side changed partway through the engagement. From day one we had been working embedded across multiple stakeholders on their team, with daily and weekly rhythms in place from the start. When the transition happened, there was no single contact to re-onboard and no context that needed rebuilding. The work continued without interruption.

With our feedback, changing leadership on our end and specific product requirements, they created a plan of action and I personally worked with Gergely on working through the plan to get to where we are today - Jamie Coleman, Senior Developer Advocate, GBG Loqate

What the docs look like now

A developer landing on the Loqate docs today gets one clear path in. The homepage tells them exactly where to start. Every product section follows the order a developer needs during an integration. The support content that had been sitting outside the system is now part of it.

Most of the time when a tool reaches this level of maturity with this many capabilities, documentation can get tangled up. Accompany a clear path with a high quality tool and you end up with outstanding documentation." - Gergely, documentation manager, Hackmamba

We are proud of this one

When a company comes back to you for a second product, that says more than any case study can. GBG worked with us on GBG GO, and when they needed the same work done for Loqate, they came back.

I would say that our documentation is now one of, if not the best in our industry! -Jamie Coleman, Senior Developer Advocate, GBG Loqate

Hackmamba is proud to be the best developer documentation agency doing this work. We have done this for Novu, Celo, Chaos Labs, and AI Insurance. If your docs need the same attention, let's talk.