The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
Splunk Documentation Teamamazon.com
The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
Working with another author can be a fun way to shake things up, get a second perspective on your work, learn new skills, and uncover style variations between writers for the same product.
Splunk Documentation Team • The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
the lack of writer participation in the development cycle can also lead to inconsistent UI designs, naming conventions, and error messages,
Splunk Documentation Team • The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
our experience indicates that a useful audience definition works better than a persona for training new writers, applying techniques like learning objectives, guiding broader information design and development questions, and enabling customers to identify what content is relevant to them.
Splunk Documentation Team • The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
Every tech writer knows two basic things about our work: We spend only a fraction of our time actually writing. The information development cycle is circular and continuous.
Splunk Documentation Team • The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
Push the product managers to write scenario-based user stories. All too often, stories don’t provide enough context for meaningful development work. This context is important not just for you, the tech writer, but for everyone from the marketing, sales, QA, support, and training teams. Everyone needs to know who the audience is and what they are tr
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Add story points and priority values to the tickets that have documentation impact. There are tasks that require a lot of engineering work and very little documentation work. There are other tasks that require a small or medium amount of engineering work but require a large amount of documentation work. Make your work visible in the same tickets th
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Technical writers craft connections between an audience and a product. To build these connections, you need to identify your users as clearly as possible. You also need to identify your users’ goals: the problems they want to solve, the decisions they need to make, or the things they want to build. Equipped with this audience awareness, you can wri
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Make a direct offer to assist where you’re able. People are frustrated because they can’t do something they expect to do easily.
Splunk Documentation Team • The Product is Docs: Writing technical documentation in a product development group
Using the same tools as other team members promotes seamless interaction and provides more visibility into your information development work.