Proving the Value of Documentation

Tell me if you’ve been in this position before. You have a manager who doesn’t really know what you do, you’re the last to know about product releases, people forget they have a technical writer, and your requests for upgrades or staff get pushed to the bottom of the pile. Sound familiar?

Many technical writers, including myself, have been in this position. You feel undervalued and the company doesn’t understand the value of having a technical writer. This post will go over a few ways you can change the perception. It’s not perfect, but I hope it helps.

Good Documentation Can Save the Company Money

I’ve had conversations with multiple VPs and managers who think documentation produces no value. For them, value is monetary. We know about the benefits like conversion and retention, but having data will make it undeniable.

Work with support, customer managers, and any other team that interfaces with your client base to create content. I find out support’s top 10 issues. Then, I promote that content everywhere. Some ideas on promoting content:

• Promote the content on the documentation home page
• Add the content to a chatbot or question widget
• Ask customers if this solves their issue before submitting a ticket
• Create a standalone page and have it sent out in a newsletter
• Once it’s out, work with support to track support tickets related to the top 10 issues. I typically track the tickets for 60 days and make changes as I learn what my users respond to.

Proving a link between the content you’ve created and a reduction in support contacts is a way of showing monetary value in savings.

Onboarding Engineers Is Easier

Most companies have an onboarding process for the engineers to teach them about the tech stack and internal system. How do they learn how to use the product? Work with the product and engineering teams to create a learning plan so they can start using the product and understand their customers. Once they have gone through your documentation, solicit feedback. This will help to build relationships and goodwill between technical writing and the other teams. They’ll see the value immediately instead of being convinced later.

Align Your Documentation to Company Goals

Companies create goals; typically, those goals don’t list technical writing. You can align your content planning to the company’s goals. For example, a company goal could be to increase the number of users by X%. As a technical writer, you can start working on content that increases engagement. Is there a tutorial that needs a refresh? Track the number of views between the old and the new version. Find ways to create and track goals along with the broader organization.

Educate Internal Users

Most people have no real idea of what a technical writer does. Try to spend time educating the company on what you do. Schedule some time with teams or ask to present in the all-hands. Some topics and ideas you can cover are:

• What is technical writing?
• What are the technical writers at your company responsible for?
  • Ways they can collaborate.
  • Do you have office hours?
  • How can they request work?
• Lead a workshop on writing. Google has a great technical writing course for engineers.
• Each quarter, twice yearly, create and present a report detailing what the technical writing accomplished.
  • Pull some data showing the most viewed, least viewed, and what people searched for.
  • What new content was created and the impact it had.
  • Projects you collaborated on with others.
  • Goals for the next time.

You’ll have to continuously educate others on your role to make lasting changes.

I hope some of these suggestions help; it can be tough being in an organization where you have no help or have to prove your worth. Join the Write the Docs Slack to talk with other documentarians worldwide.

Today’s cover by: Today’s cover was generated using Microsoft Bing Image Creator. The prompt I used: Create an image that shows people collaborating. They should be in a meeting room. Use the same cartoon style as bobs burgers.