My strategy on content
In software, there's a content hierarchy for the user. It starts at the UI, and as each stage fails, your users progress towards expensive hands-on support and situations that erode reputation:
- UI
- UI hints
- UI help
- Help site
- Chat agents
- Community questions
- Customer support
- Account executive
- Specialist support
- Account manager
- Executive leadership
Your aim is to make self-help work for users, so you can focus your people on developing technology, opportunities, and professional services. If you fix problems closer to the UI, your users spend more time being productive, and will be more likely to extend their relationship with you.
Ideally, a technical writer makes help sites and support obsolete. Quote me on that.
Traits of a technical writer
This isn't everything. Technical writers have different profiles. These are the traits and soft skills that a software company should value. Some of these are less obvious, but they make positive impact.
Subject matter expert
Becomes a SME in the product, and understands the user's needs.
- Has empathy for what users want, and knows how to achieve it using the product.
- Creates content to bridge the knowledge gap, between what most users know, and what they need to know for success.
- Knows where documentation is missing, sets expectations in customer-facing parts of the organization to enable success, and works to fix documentation.
- Has a hands-on approach, to use pre-release versions of the product in a repeatable test environment.
Collaborative
Collaborates deeply and widely across the development life cycle (SDLC or PDLC), and across your functions.
- Manages risk through timely planning, can create a minimum viable product (MVP) when it's urgent, grow content with new information, and maintain and improve at other times.
- Engages in two-way collaboration for alignment and describing the product or UI.
- Provides highly responsive support at critical phases of the life cycle. For example, around feature releases.
Transparent
Is open about projects, so people can see work plans, priorities, and status, without needing to ask.
- Maintains sources of truth, for mutual participation.
- Upholds standards of transparency, and asks it of others.
- Directs attention to productive collaborations that serve the users.
- Happy to explain anything about the work.
- Advocates effective practice, mentors and grows others.
Manages maintenance invisibly
- Organizes information to make it discoverable and quickly read, to keeps your users productive.
- Welcomes and actively seeks feedback from many sources, improves feedback workflow, and unifies actions into a backlog: leadership, customers, customer success, pre-sales, product experts, content teams, UX designers, software engineering.
- Collaborates across functions to communicate bigger improvements.
Service mindset
Treats content as a service to product managers and delivery managers.
- Sets expectations that product managers can rely on.
- Documentation and UI consultation is a deliverable, and technical writing is visible in the whole SDLC.
Content advocate
- Champions accessibility, puts text first, and knows when to use other media to communicate effectively.
- Uses content principles to foster collaboration and help other functions with their work.
- Sets effective boundaries to balance efficiency while advocating for the needs of users.
- Is open to review the writing of other team members, identifying as user and expert personas.
Evolving
Actively evolves style and workflow to best serve users.
- Ranks clarity above compliance to style. Knows when to break rules, and when to propose changes to style.
- Exercises efficient collaborative governance. Discusses proposed changes quickly and converts them into lasting actions, as discoverable reference.
Balanced
Maintains a balance to respect everyone's time
- Attends the most productive meetings, maintains an appropriate frequency of contact, across any media: direct messages, team chat, email, live video, in-person.
- Is open to quick communications of needs, or notice of discussions, to catch everything else.