Keeping your help center current when your entire product changes

Company

Monetary, formerly DebtBook, is a treasury platform built specifically for government and nonprofit finance teams. The platform brings debt, cash, investments, and accounting together in one connected system, helping finance leaders manage their financial resources with greater clarity and confidence.

Industry

Software, Financial Management, Government Technology

Key Features

Login Profile, Recipe Builder, Custom Styling, Automated Annotation, Help Center Audit, Screenshot Comparisons, Intercom Sync and Implementation Services.

Overview

With thousands of product screenshots across hundreds of help articles, maintaining accurate visuals as DebtBook’s product evolved had become an increasingly difficult challenge. Rather than continuing to rely on a manual process of reviewing, recreating, and replacing screenshots whenever the product changed, DebtBook set out to modernize how its screenshot library was managed—introducing LaunchBrightly to establish a scalable, repeatable approach to ongoing screenshot maintenance.

Soon after, DebtBook began preparing for a company-wide rebrand and major product redesign, bringing new styling, navigation, URLs, and significant changes across key areas of the application.

For a help center so heavily reliant on product visuals, the implications were significant. A large portion of its screenshot library would soon need to change at once—while the existing documentation still needed to accurately reflect the product customers were using today.

The challenge

Major product redesigns create a unique problem for support and documentation teams. Software products are continuously evolving, and the screenshots throughout a help center need to keep pace with those changes. But a large-scale redesign concentrates that change into a much narrower window—making hundreds, or even thousands, of product visuals outdated almost simultaneously.

For DebtBook, the scale was substantial: thousands of product visuals across hundreds of help articles would need to move with the redesign. Each visual would need to be recreated against the redesigned product, styled and annotated consistently, matched back to the correct help article, and replaced individually. At the scale of its help center, what might be manageable for a handful of screenshots quickly becomes a months-long documentation project—all while the product continues to evolve around it.

There was no realistic way to manually recreate thousands of screenshots.Alissa Moorey, Customer Education Manager at Monetary

“When we realized it was an entire product redesign, the scale of the screenshot work became overwhelming,” says Alissa Moorey, Customer Education Manager at Monetary. “There was no realistic way our team could manually recreate thousands of screenshots and keep everything accurate. It would have been months of work, with the product constantly changing around us.”

The challenge extended beyond volume. DebtBook needed to begin preparing its documentation around the new product experience ahead of launch, while ensuring the screenshots already live in the help center continued to accurately reflect what customers could see and use today. Updating visuals too early would create user confusion; waiting until launch to begin the work would leave the team facing an enormous screenshot refresh after the new experience was already in customers’ hands.

“The timing was just as important as the scale,” explains Alia Schultz, Sr. Director, Customer Success at Monetary. “We needed our help center to continue reflecting the current product right up until launch, but we also couldn’t afford to wait until the new experience was live before starting such a significant refresh.”

DebtBook therefore needed more than a faster way to create screenshots. It needed a scalable way to manage thousands of visual changes as part of a controlled documentation workflow—preparing for a major product transformation without allowing the help center to fall out of step before, during, or after the transition.

The solution

With LaunchBrightly already running across its help center, DebtBook wasn’t staring down the usual redesign playbook: countless hours hunting down screenshots and meticulously planning how to recreate thousands of visuals across hundreds of help articles by hand. The automation infrastructure was already there. Instead of the redesign becoming a massive standalone documentation project, DebtBook could use the same system already keeping its screenshots current to carry the help center through the transformation.

This was particularly important because the redesign went far beyond a new color palette. DebtBook was becoming Monetary, with a new visual identity, updated navigation and URLs, and significant changes throughout the product. But the automation itself didn’t need to be rebuilt around the new experience. The same screenshot automation recipes already maintaining DebtBook’s help center carried over to Monetary and were reprocessed against the redesigned product, allowing the team to prepare fresh screenshots across the help center ahead of launch. That meant the team could put screenshot automation in place before the redesign, use it to keep DebtBook current in the meantime, and carry the same system through to Monetary—so there was no need to wait until launch to begin, or take on a separate automation project once Monetary went live.

LaunchBrightly’s audit workflow then gave DebtBook control over the transition itself. The updated screenshots could be generated and reviewed against the redesigned Monetary experience while the current versions remained live in the help center. Preparing the new documentation and publishing it were deliberately separate steps, so customers continued to see screenshots that matched the product they were using right up until launch—giving the team complete control over what went live and when.

With LaunchBrightly already in place, updating screenshots became one of the easiest parts of our rebrand.Alissa Moorey, Customer Education Manager at Monetary

When the redesigned product was ready to launch, LaunchBrightly already had each screenshot mapped to every place it appeared across the help center, so the approved Monetary screenshots could be synced directly back to every corresponding article—including wherever the same screenshot appeared across multiple articles. Rather than releasing the new experience and then beginning the long process of catching its documentation up, DebtBook could have the help center move with the product—with thousands of updated visuals pushed live alongside it.

“We were expecting the screenshot side of the redesign to be a huge undertaking,” Alissa says. “Instead, because LaunchBrightly was already in place, it became one of the easiest parts for our team to manage.”

That turned what could have been months of planning and manual screenshot work into a controlled screenshot governance process: preparing the refresh in advance, keeping the live help center accurate until launch, and then moving the updated documentation forward with the product.

The outcome

When the redesigned product went live, Monetary’s help center moved with it. On the day, LaunchBrightly had synced fresh product screenshots across hundreds of help articles—replacing outdated visuals throughout the documentation with screenshots reflecting the new Monetary experience.

Instead of spending months after launch working through a massive screenshot backlog, Monetary was able to bring its visual documentation forward alongside the product itself. Thousands of screenshots that would otherwise have required individual recreation and replacement were updated through the automation and governance process already in place.

We could launch knowing our customers would see documentation that matched the product from day oneAlia Schultz, Sr. Director, Customer Success at Monetary

“Launching a completely redesigned product and having our help center reflect that new experience on launch day would have been impossible for us to achieve manually,” says Alia. “That completely changed what launch looked like for our team. Instead of bracing for months of manual work, we could launch knowing our customers would see documentation that matched the product from day one.”

More importantly, the redesign didn’t leave Monetary with another one-time cleanup project waiting around the corner. The product continued to evolve quickly in the weeks after launch, bringing further UI changes across the application—but the same automation was already there to keep pace. Recurring audits continued generating fresh screenshots, comparing them against what was currently live, and helping the team keep the help center aligned as Monetary continued to change.

The redesign concentrated an unusually large amount of product change into a short window, but the outcome reinforced the broader value of the system already put in place: a scalable, repeatable way to keep thousands of product visuals accurate through everyday UI updates, major redesigns, and everything in between.

We'd love to show you how this works in real life, so feel free to shoot us an email at hello@launchbrightly.com — OR just grab some time on our calendar. 🤗