> The documentation was complete, correct, and relatively terse. Less than a page.
No, that's YOUR IMPRESSION of your own writing.
There are many reasons why others might not find what you wrote sufficient to understand it. You boss ran it through AI for a reason and that reason was most likely because it the document was not understandable or perhaps confusing.
Did the document have usage examples? Did it explain context and background? Did it use "precise" jargon that not everyone knows? Did you follow up the documentation writing with a meeting with stakeholders/users to see if they had questions?
It sounds like you just "threw it over the wall" like you were done with it and left your boss to figure out how to get others to use it. If you find that you have "near constant" struggle to communicate, there is a strong possibility that the problem is yours and not everyone else.
None of us knows the exact situation but the fact that the person said his documentation was "complete, correct, and relatively terse" is a red-flag. It seems to me like smug over-confidence.
If the document really was so clear and error-free, then why would the boss try to "fix it"?
Assuming you're correct that the commenter is unaware of their communications deficiencies, then as much of your confident criticism should be directed at a manager who would silently change a spec sheet for some reason, and not coach the employee on why that was needed.
If it was truly a manager, where the main role of their job is to manage the performance of their employees, then they failed here.
> There are many reasons why others might not find what you wrote sufficient to understand it. You boss ran it through AI for a reason and that reason was most likely because it the document was not understandable or perhaps confusing.
It could also be because their manager is less technical. It's not unusual in my life for a PM to try to "rephrase" or restate things I've written in order to make them "easier to understand" in a way that in fact falsifies them or makes them more difficult to understand for the people who will actually have to work on/with it.
"Tell them [very specific answer targeted at X party]"
PM: "They are still asking about Y, see their response with the follow up question"
Then in the original send of [specific thing] PM has transformed it into [something else]. X party has followed up with a question that was answered by [specific thing]. Yes PM you might have been confused but you weren't the target.
There are many reasons why others might not find what you wrote sufficient to understand it. You boss ran it through AI for a reason and that reason was most likely because it the document was not understandable or perhaps confusing.
Did the document have usage examples? Did it explain context and background? Did it use "precise" jargon that not everyone knows? Did you follow up the documentation writing with a meeting with stakeholders/users to see if they had questions?
It sounds like you just "threw it over the wall" like you were done with it and left your boss to figure out how to get others to use it. If you find that you have "near constant" struggle to communicate, there is a strong possibility that the problem is yours and not everyone else.