How Technical Writers Can Benefit Your Business
A technical writer is a necessity to any business and its operations. Their skills and expertise reach far into all business sectors, enhancing performance by solidifying efficient processes and creating simple-to-understand content. Well-written documentation can impact whether a customer purchases a business’s product, as it is typically the first thing they see — content is king, and a technical writer can help make it happen.
Technical writers have helped many businesses transform complex technological systems into simple processes that can be understood by their employees, stakeholders, and customers. Q4 Inc., for example, has understood the need for such skills and has a team of technical writers to produce internal and forward-facing documentation. But how exactly do technical writers contribute to business operations? How do they provide value to employees? And when should you think about hiring a technical writer (or several)?
Why Technical Writing Is Important to Business?
Technical writing is present in nearly every specialized workplace in the world and can bring both tangible and intangible value to any business.
Tangible value could include the writing produced for the business in a variety of formats. These formats can include article/blog posts, White Papers, software user guides, product manuals, API documentation, social media posts, website copywriting, online help centers, brochures, company policies/procedures, and the list goes on and on.
Intangible value can include the positive effects the tangible value has on a business — we will discuss this in more detail in the next section.
Above all else, technical writing is vital in the effective communication of technologies to both internal (company employees, product management, developers, etc.) and external (customers, shareholders, third-party integrators, etc.) parties. In terms of purpose, the secondary goal of technical writing is for the reader to understand, but the primary goal is for a potential prospect (whether internal or external) to be understood.
This approach can make technical writing even more of a necessity since the writer is not just focused on explaining technical content, but they are thinking about how to structure the business’s core offering in a way that feels like the customer’s pain points are understood at a deep level. This understanding can immediately increase a business’s perceived value, without adding any new offerings — that is the superpower of a technical writer.
How a Technical Writer Brings Value to Various Business Operations/Teams
An employee/contractor with technical writing abilities can assist various teams so that their focus is not taken away from their primary responsibilities and, as a result, save a business money. Because most technical writers have backgrounds in engineering, science, or software development, they can frequently program, design websites, perform extensive research, train, and provide other technical services, thereby, becoming a business powerhouse of usefulness. They can use problem-solving abilities to streamline procedures, effectively communicate, and fulfill deadlines.
While computers have simplified tasks in the workplace, in some cases they have also resulted in a slight shift away from technical content creation towards a heavy focus on developing a product/service. Since Q4 has integrated technical writers into their business to address this shift and put a focus back on the content, here are just a few examples of how they have assisted in various business operations/teams:
- Design (UI/UX): By far the most important use of a technical writer’s skills is within a design team. The reason for this is that technical writers can assist with sentence structure, grammar, and tone with any written forward-facing-consumer content on the software product. The technical writers at Q4 have also helped the design team during the early phases of software mock-ups to review the phrasing of sentences to ensure it is clear to a reader.
- Software Development: Technical writers work closely with the development team to gain insight into how a product will function and any caveats that need to be mentioned with a set of documentation. A technical writer must understand the needs of the product users who will be using the content they provide and become advocates for them. By doing so, technical writers can typically identify software bugs or confusing steps in a given process. Some technical writers also come from a software/programming background, as with Q4 writers, and can troubleshoot complex problems that arise (e.g., HTML, CSS, or JavaScript edits within a documentation software).
- Product Management: Technical writers work closely with product managers to harmonize communication deliverables with the product’s overall function. This can include creating ways to streamline ticket labeling to ensure each product release gets a complete set of internal or external release notes. Processes and procedures can be written for internal use to address all teams and allow product managers to delegate tasks based on these procedures.
- Product Operations: A product operations team is at the frontlines of business-consumer interactions. A technical writer can gain useful insights from an operations team as to how consumers perceive any form of documentation. Think of it like testing a written hypothesis. Did the consumer understand how to get to a specific window? Was an instruction misleading? Is a statement too confusing? These are the questions that can be answered through interactions with an operations team and are incredibly valuable to a technical writer’s job.
Why Should Technical Writing Be Given to a Specialist?
Technical writers can improve communication between different teams with varying levels of experience. They can also share critical information with other teams to help them be more productive. A technical writer’s writing style differs significantly from that of a novelist or a non-technical content creator and focuses on communicating facts and figures as well as providing instructions for completing tasks.
In most cases, a non-technical writer may not possess the required technical expertise within a particular field such as in fintech, engineering, or science. Therefore, the interpretation of information may not come across as genuine or well thought out and may confuse the communication between various teams. A specialist technical writer can take any technical text, understand it, and create supplementary documentation without distorting the desired message.
Want to know how to become a technical writer? Here’s a beginners guide to get you started: How to Become a Technical Writer: A Beginner’s Guide
When Should You Hire a Technical Writer?
The simple answer — as soon as possible! The best time to get a technical writer involved is at the start of a new project you would like them to add value to. This is because technical writers need to become subject matter experts in the product they are writing documentation for to ensure they understand it better than anyone else in the business. Of course, technical writers can come in at a later point in a project, but the onboarding process may take slightly longer, especially if the product offering is extensive or growing at an accelerated rate.
The return on investment (ROI) of a technical writer is a difficult metric to track compared to, for example, a salesperson. The return on investment of a salesperson is easily determined based on their performance (number of deals closed, customer satisfaction with their service, etc.). With a technical writer, value is added exponentially the longer the writer integrates themselves into a business. This value can be in the form of improved employee/customer satisfaction, lowered customer support costs, and maximized customer skills with the product.
The bottom line is, the earlier a technical writer is integrated into a business, the more obvious the ROI will be.
Here’s a video on Technical Writer’s at Google discussing how they have contributed their unique skills to deliver the information a user needs to know:
