Show Me the Money: How to Get Your Docs the Love and Support They Deserve

Description

The docs are a valuable part of your product, so how do you prove to leadership that they deserve even more time and attention? This is the conversation no one wants to be part of, but everyone needs to have. We'll talk about using technical writing skills and metrics to educate our internal company leadership audience and generate business support for our work. We'll look at:

  • Why we need to sell the docs internally
    • It's a business, after all
    • Trust must be built
    • People are recreating the same content!
    • Psychological effects on us from underappreciation
  • How to align writing the docs with business goals (or the other way around ;)
    • Understand product, division, and company goals
    • Prepare an elevator pitch aligning doc work to company goals
    • Pitch documentation as a solution
  • What teams to connect with, what to share with them, and how
    • Build camaraderie with Support
    • Share information with Sales
    • Build information experiences with Marketing
  • How to translate doc metrics into business justification
    • The 5 doc metrics that matter
    • Correlate doc metrics with Support burden
    • Attach to Sales wins
    • Follow Marketing campaigns
  • Where to start
    • Start collecting metrics
    • Be helpful, and practical
    • Start selling to your direct leader
  • How to share the journey
    • Connect with a few folks from other teams
    • Share successes and failures with your team
    • Turn to the WTD community

This talk not only gives you arguments to build a documentation trusting culture internally, but also to garner the resources to make your docs better for everyone.

  • Conference: Write the Docs PORTLAND
  • Year: 2019

About the speaker

Matt Reiner