Composability (noun)
The ability to combine independent parts, unchanged, into new arrangements for different purposes.
Suppose our organization publishes product documentation to an online documentation portal and to help panels inside some of our products, and plans to add an AI assistant as a third channel.
The account-creation procedure belongs in the portal’s getting-started section, in the help panel on the sign-up screen, and in any answer the AI assistant gives about getting started. If we write each piece as a self-contained topic, our publishing system can arrange the topics one way for the portal and another for the help panels, and the AI assistant can retrieve the topics relevant to a question.
That arrangement works only when each topic makes sense on its own. A procedure that begins “Now that you’ve completed the steps above” depends on the page it was written for. Publish it in another channel, and the steps it refers to aren’t there, so someone has to edit it first.
