Onboard Yourself 4: Find Quick Wins
Start signaling progress to gain buy-in.
After confirming your observations through feedback in step three, it’s time to put them to use. Each observation is an opportunity to change something. It could be fixing something bad or amplifying something good. Either way, these will help you find some quick wins.
Quick wins are a powerful way to show your value when you’re the sole writer or working with people who aren’t sure of your role. Use your knowledge about how work is done to inform what will be quick and avoid what seems quick but will likely snowball into something larger.
In step two, I listed some example observations. Well, now let’s look at them and identify some quick wins:
- Users are presented with many options, but there’s no content to help explain the benefits of each.
✅ Quick win: Write an overview page. - People are looking for guidance on how to use inclusive language in their work.
✅ Quick win: Write a blog or entry in an existing style guide. - A remote workforce has increased the importance of documentation.
❌ Not a quick win, but use this for buy-in. - Page titles are more fun than clear.
✅ Quick win: Update some titles. - Technical writing is not well-understood.
❌ Not a quick win: Use this for buy-in and visibility. - The documentation lifecycle is not clear.
❌ Not a quick win: It’s a trap I’d avoid for now. - It’s not clear where information should go.
❌ Not a quick win: It’s a trap I’d avoid for now. - It’s hard to tell how content is performing.
✅ Quick win: Introduce metrics. For example, reuse an existing solution the company has.
If those still seemed too big, you could:
- Fix or add code samples.
- Fix broken links.
- Fix typos.
- Create a procedure template.
They’ll still be helpful and let you get your foot in the door.
Information architecture
Creating an information architecture (IA) is not a small win, but it can be a medium win since there’s a fairly standard process to follow. I want to highlight IA because it’s been my most successful version of showing early value so far. I used creating an IA to gain context while producing something to show for it at the end. As part of this project, I did the following activities:
- Audit the existing content.
- Review similar external sites.
- Engage with users through a card sort.
- Prototype an IA.
- Test the prototype.
- Write up and present the proposed IA.
This is a significant amount of work, and there’s output at each step that you can point to, so it makes for an excellent presentation. IA is a great example because it’s a problem many people recognize but don’t know how to solve. This allows you to step in and show your expertise by highlighting the nature of the problem and then resolving it with evidence.
Share your work
Join demos to share the work you’ve been doing. By demos, I mean any presentations where people show their work. It’s good to show the problem you were thinking about and the solution you’re proposing. This brings people along on the journey with you and helps them understand the type of task you can do. It’s particularly helpful when you’re working as a sole writer because people may not understand what your job entails, and this shows the depth of thought and why something may take a certain period of time.
As I mentioned earlier, the most success I’ve had with this was showing off an IA project. I found that talking through that process and showing the interesting visual results you get from a tool like Optimal Workshop can elicit a bunch of “oos and ahhs” and trigger some good discussions.
So get out there, be visible, and show your working.
Next steps
This is part of a series of posts explaining an approach to onboarding yourself in a new role. After finding some quick wins, the next step is to Set longer-term goals. If you want an overview, see Onboard yourself.
Michael Belton is a Technical Writer at Carted, a software company seeking to empower the future of eCommerce. He’s interested in helping people through content, explaining complex things simply, and making good food. Find him on his Twitter, @mykale37.
