Your Checklist for Building a Successful Technical Writing Program
In a previous post, I covered the three most basic rules of technical writing that you can follow to support your customer-users with helpful technical content. In this post, I want to cover a checklist that small businesses and start-ups can use to integrate technical communications into their broader organization and processes.
Why? Well, it’s easy to think of support content as it’s own siloed process that could live in a number of departments. It might reside in:
Customer Success, as an effort to support customer engagement and product competence.
Product, as an effort to support product adoption and internal technical fluency.
Sales and Marketing, as an effort for sales or CS enablement and customer marketing.
However, regardless of where technical support content lives in your organization, it actually should be a nexus for all of those functions.
Customer Success needs to be enabled to support your product and needs customer marketing content to drive engagement.
Product needs their customer-users to be trained effectively and supported as they use the product.
Sales and Marketing need content to support technical expertise and trial adoption.
The takeaway from this is that you need to build cross-team processes to capture technical knowledge, create content that connects customer use cases to product workflows, and then find ways of distributing that to the teams that need it in scalable ways.
How? Read on…
1. Learn about your customers’ problems
“You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)”
Back in college I had an instructor in the Education department that used this Joe Jackson song to make a point about pedagogy. It was corny, but you know, I’m sitting here nearly two decades later with that phrase (and that admittedly bangin’ horn lick) bouncing around my head.
Before you attempt any kind of education—whether it’s in a classroom or in a product user guide, you have to know what you want your learners to accomplish. Thus, before you start drafting technical documentation, you have to gain a deep understanding of your customers' pain points and challenges.
What is it that your users want to accomplish?
Figuring this out means really digging in:
Talk to your Product Managers to learn what kinds of use cases your customers have.
Read through product feedback to understand what your customers want to be able to do with your produce.
Find opportunities to meet directly with power users to pick their brains.
Regularly elicit input from your customer success team to gather insights from the front lines.
Read support tickets, listen to customer calls, and analyze user behavior patterns.
By empathizing with your customers' needs and concerns, you'll be better equipped to address them with your content. This not only improves your customers' experience but also contributes to your product's overall value proposition.
2. Understand your business’s solutions
There’s no faking it. You must be an expert.
To effectively communicate the value of your product and its proper usage, you must become an expert in it. This means not only understanding the product’s technical intricacies, foibles, and idiosyncrasies, but also how it fits into the broader story of your customers’ use cases and your business’s vision.
Technical writers should collaborate closely with product and engineering teams, be experts at using products, and immerse themselves in the complexity that creating and supporting a product can entail.
Being well-versed in your product helps ensure that your documentation is accurate, relevant, and resonates with your audience.
No time to bone up before jumping into a new documentation project?
We’ve all been there. Be dogged in getting answers from SMEs. Bug your customer support and product contacts to provide context about customer use cases (see #1 above!). Escalate to their managers when you have deadlines to meet and they aren’t being cooperative.
And don’t worry too much about coming off as a pest—your job is to be the first line of defense for your customers. When something doesn’t make sense to you, that’s an opportunity to gather more information and turn that confusion into future documentation: if it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s not going to make sense to your customers.
3. Bring your teams together
Don’t be strangers!
The success of a technical writing program hinges on collaboration across many different teams. Position technical communications at the crossroads of support, onboarding, product, and product marketing. By building these connections, you can be a real force multiplier across your organization.
Forge partnerships with your marketing team to infuse design elements into your documentation
Collaborate with product experts for accurate insights
Tap into account management for a comprehensive voice-of-customer perspective
Work with any team responsible for product adoption to find ways to distribute your content to ensure wide reach.
Create the “synergy” businesses are always blogging about.
When you do it right, you can make your technical content team a foundational part of each of these teams, and end up building a scalable, leveraged—and indispensable—function.
4. Meet your customers where they need the most help
Be there.
Customers interact with your product at various stages of their journey, and your support documentation should be there every step of the way.
Provide support for onboarding programs and new user training.
Work with your product team to provide in-app education if necessary.
Create helpful workflow guides aimed at getting value out of your platform.
Build troubleshooting guides for when things go wrong.
Catering to diverse user needs will help you educate users about not just what to do when things go right, but what to do when things go wrong, too.
Don’t hide your content—make it a part of your product experience.
Consider carefully where your content lives, as well. Make your knowledge base or help center accessible and a great customer experience. Be sure not to increase your users’ frustration while they are already in the vulnerable position of seeking help and guidance for your product.
5. Build the right content
Don’t waste your time on the wrong content.
Effective technical writing isn't about flooding your customers with any and all information. Instead, tailor your documentation to address specific customer pain points and usage scenarios. Consider different document types, such as step-by-step guides, video tutorials, FAQs, and knowledge base articles.
Your new users might benefit from comprehensive onboarding guides, while experienced power-users may value from in-depth troubleshooting resources. By catering to varying needs, you ensure your documentation remains a valuable resource for all users.
Sounds hard? Don’t fret.
Remember way back in item #1 when I said you needed to really understand what your customers’ needs are? This one should be pretty easy if you’ve done the work on that. Just look at what your users need to accomplish, recognize what your product can do to help, and create content to bridge the gap.
6. Be smart about content management
Creating content is just the first step.
As your technical writing program grows, content management becomes an absolute necessity. Use best practices to maintain an organized and efficient documentation program. Implement version control to track changes, ensure consistency in style and tone, and establish guidelines for not just content creation but content maintenance as well.
Get creative!
Find ways to reuse and extend content. When a fundamental concept is explained once and can be referenced across various documents, you save time, ensure consistency, and maintain a source-of-truth for that concept.
With that in mind, explore tools and automation that streamline content creation, distribution, and updates across everywhere your business can benefit from it:
Serve smart, AI-driven answers from your Support interface to improve ticket deflection, improve user outcomes, and drive scalability.
Embed help content in in-app tooltips that reference source-of-truth content in your knowledge base.
Create email nurture programs that pull content from your training guides and help your customers find the stickiest and most valuable workflows that will drive their adoption.
There are countless ways of driving content programs at scale with the technical content that a technical writing program creates.
7. Measure twice, cut once
Then measure again and again and again…
A recurring theme in the items above is that a successful technical writing program is more than documentation for documentation’s sake—it's a strategic asset with measurable impact.
To gauge its effectiveness, focus on key metrics like:
User engagement
Number of support tickets
Issue resolution speed
Product adoption
Qualitative user feedback
Implement analytics tools for data-driven insights and refine your content based on trends you discover. Showcase the program's ROI to your stakeholders by quantifying cost savings, improved user experience, greater efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, and business growth.
By aligning your technical writing program's success with tangible business results, you can transform your documentation program into a strategic growth driver, helping to improve your users’ experience and reduce costs.
Now, get writing!
