Technical Communicators: Why we rarely find them in the wild

Technical communicators are an elusive species. They live off of complex and unusable technology and prey on words that make no sense, but no one really understands what these creatures do. You might know them as technical writers, information developers, knowledge engineers, Shakespeare and my personal favorite: “that guy who writes”.

The untrained eye might have trouble telling them apart, but if you are trying to get a “that guy who writes”, you won’t find a technical communicator. If you are looking for a technical writer, you’ll find a “that guy who writes”.

Just because it has stripes, doesn’t mean it’s a zebra.

Of course a technical communicator needs excellent writing skills, but that’s far from what defines the role. All the commonly recognized terms in the industry are too narrow to define what really makes a technical communicator. Writing is the easy part! Apart from style, consistency and language proficiency, anyone can write a procedure explaining something.

In order to build the Tech Comm team at Feedzai we hold writing challenges many candidates that have writing or linguistics experience deliver walls of text without formatting or punctuation this text is often too complicated and challenging to read. See what I did there? Spoiler alert: those candidates are not hired.

10 key traits

There are 10 key traits that help us distinguish a technical communicator from someone who writes. A technical communicator:

1. Understands the core message and considers what the reader needs to learn and focuses on explaining what’s really relevant.
2. Asks (the right) questions to find the right information before explaining it and to bring the reader’s point of view into consideration.
3. Turns complexity into simplicity by helping a complex product feel more accessible and writes better documentation by going straight to the point and actually writing less.
4. Thinks visually and explains complex and detailed constructions to a designer or builds visual representations without help.
5. Gets stuff done by setting up the product and testing it, being practical and pragmatic and prioritizing what packs a stronger punch.
6. Is technically inclined from a technical background or from skill/experience in maintaining a technical dialog with engineers or other technical profiles.
7. Collaborates and communicates with stakeholders, with the readers, with the entire company by constantly seeking feedback and acting on it.
8. Has received training from formal training, e.g. a Tech Comm degree, or from mentorship with more experienced technical communicators who possess these traits.
9. Has experience (or potential), draws inspiration from good examples and best practices, thinks in terms of patterns, uses professional (and sometimes custom) tooling, and demonstrates a sixth sense as to what works and what doesn’t.
10. Pushes for improvement, demonstrates leadership by taking on new initiatives without being afraid of challenges, and looks at failure as an opportunity to improve.

The strength of diversity

These qualities aren’t always inherent and an individual does not necessarily possess all of them. For example, I have a lot of trouble when trying to think visually (I would be an awful designer) and never had any formal Tech Comm training.

In modern tech organizations (in this case, software), technical communicators have to play multiple instruments but they don’t have to be a virtuoso in every single one. This realization has made me look at our quest for these technical communicorns through a different lens.

Without lowering expectations or quality, that these key traits (and others) need to emerge as the sum of the skills of individuals in a team. It’s okay to have someone join a team without a technical background, but there should be another team member with a technical background in order to keep things balanced.

We’ve hired people with little experience, but who have huge potential. We have people that suck at visuals (me…) and others that are pretty much honorary designers already. Some team members have technical education while others come from a linguistics background.

At Feedzai, our mindset as a Tech Comm team has shifted in such a way that we now want to have a mix of technical vs language experts, candidates with experience vs potential, people from different cultural backgrounds, and several different special talents.

However, finding these profiles is becoming increasingly more difficult. Lots of new tech companies pop up every day and many of them reach a stage where they recognize the importance of having a Tech Comm team. They all want to be the best, so there’s a lot of fragmentation for tech comm’ers.

On one side, traditional technical writers that don’t leave the comfort zone of “just writing” will not land these opportunities. On the other end it’s challenging to combine several of these special people in the same team because the bar is being set too high. The ecosystem is so relentless, that whenever someone stands out, everyone wants to move in quickly.

Have you witnessed a sighting?

If someone shows up and checks all the boxes, of course we’d be thrilled to have them on the team. And then we’ll make them tell us where the other technical communicorns are hiding! However, we’d be incredibly happy to find someone who checks most boxes and brings something special to the team.

A technical communicorn in disguise caught vacationing in Scotland.

So, have you witnessed a sighting? Please let us know!

Have you heard rumors? It’s worth checking them out!

Are you one of them? It’s okay, you can tell us!