erin vang - rockstars, not typists! expanding your influence in tech organizations; soap! 2015

Rockstars, not typists! © 2015 Dolby Laboratories, Inc.

Rockstars, not typists!

Expanding your influence in tech organizations

Erin Vang, PMP

Senior Manager, Broadcast Technology Communications Dolby Laboratories San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Nürnberg, and Wrocław

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It’s an old story: tech writers get mistaken for the typing pool. Engineers aren’t sure why they should have to explain things to writers or review our drafts. When there’s a shortage of writers, people ask us why we can’t just get a couple student interns to help with formatting.

But we know better! Let’s discuss how to bring up tech writers’ level of contribution and visibility, so our stakeholders finally start to recognize us as the rockstars who help make products better. We enable customer success, we help our collaborators who see a bigger picture, and we ultimately increase the production capacity of the whole team. We do all these things by using our tech comm superpowers for good. We are the secret, hidden rockstars in tech organizations, and it’s time to get the word out!


Who’s here?

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How many of you are technical writers? Stand up!Keep standing. How many of you are illustrators? Stand up!Photographers?Voiceover artists?Video?User interface or user experience designers? …Managers of people like this?

How many of you are rockstars? Keep standing if you are… OK, good—we can skip most of my slides!

How many of you are RECOGNIZED as rockstars?

OK, so that’s the part we need to work on. It’s an easy four-step process.


Achieve rockstar status in four easy steps

1. Be a rockstar 2. Advertise the concert tour

3. Fill the stadium with sound

4. Sell t-shirts

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Easy, right? You’ve got 2 of them down already. Be a rockstar, and Fill the stadium with sound.

So why are you skipping the other 2 steps?Why aren’t you advertising?


1. Be a rockstar

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Easy. Buy an electric guitar. You’re done, right?

No! You need way more gear than that!

And then there’s music lessons since you were six. Hours in the practice room, alone, sweating, woodshedding licks. Years in a garage band. A whole bunch of luck.


1. Be a rockstar

Learn the craft Learn the subject matter Learn the tools of the profession

Get to know the stars

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…in other words, learn the craft, and learn the subject matter.

Also learn the tools of the profession. Microsoft Word? FrameMaker? XML? DocBook? PI-Mod? Functional design? DITA? HTML? Illustrator? Photoshop? Visio? CAD? Photography? Videography? Voiceover?

Do it. Do lots of it.

You don’t just buy an electric guitar and then go on the road—you get a solid education, and you get a whole bunch of experience, and you DO THE WORK.

Go to conferences, hear from experts, get to know other people doing this kind of work. Learn from everyone you can.

You’ve done all that, right? Good. Be proud of yourself. Don’t let anyone treat you like less than a rockstar.


2. Advertise the concert tour

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Put up billboards. Buy radio and TV spots. Blitz the market everywhere you’ll be playing.


2. Advertise the concert tour

Tell people what you’re up to Tell everyone Tell them why you’re doing it

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Don’t just be the quiet writer in the corner! Tell them what you’re working on.

Tell anyone who will listen—the engineers, the marketing people, the product managers, the tech support group, your boss, your boss’s boss, the CEO if you can find her. Have your elevator speech ready!

Tell people the value of what you do. Tell people the costs of not doing it, or of doing it badly.

If you’re retooling, adopting a new content strategy, migrating into a new era, tell people about it! Make a big deal about it. Tell people WHY you’re doing it. Explain the problems or the risks of the old way. Explain the value of the new way. Tell them how this will make things better for customers.

Know the numbers. Know the costs of what you’re doing, and also know the costs of NOT doing it.

If you’re a rockstar, just about anything is an excuse for a press release. Don’t miss any opportunity to tell people what you’re up to.

Managers, every time you visit a new office or meet a new department is an excuse to give a presentation about your group. Hold a town hall-style meeting, explain what your group does, take questions, and talk up your writers!


3. Fill the stadium with sound.

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image credit: https://thestatusbro.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/650/

Or lights, or fire, or something! Give the crowd what the paid for.

DO THE WORK.



Learn Study Argue

Advocate Design Write

Rewrite Illustrate Review

Experiment Test Interview

Record Listen Debug

Debrief Translate Interpret

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Do the work!



Don’t just explain the thing you made

Tell customers how to do the thing they do

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Let’s talk about what the really great technical communicators do.

They start with the customer’s point of view. Why did they buy this thing? What do they want to use it for? Tell them how to do that! Don’t tell them what each knob and switch does—tell them how to record a concert. Don’t tell them what the Edit menu is for, tell them how to recover from mistakes.



Don’t ask the engineers how it works

Try it yourself and then show them how it doesn’t work

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Don’t ask the people with all the Mountain Dew how it works and what to use it for. Try it yourself and go through what the customers are going to go through. Tear it apart. Read the code. Debug a failure.

Don’t clean up engineering draft—read it, learn from it, take notes on it, test it out, and then write about how to get something done with it.



Get to know your audiences—all of them Recognize different perspectives & needs Help them over language barriers

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Get to know all of your audiences—not just the most obvious audience. Most of the time, there’s more than one kind of reader, and they need different things from you.

If you make electric guitars, you don’t just need to give technical details about distortion to professional sound engineers—you also need to tell beginners how to plug them in, turn them on, and tune them. You need to tell more experienced players how to change the strings. You need to tell repair techs about the circuitry and the fuses.

(Do electric guitars have fuses? They must, right? I mean, otherwise, how come those guys don’t get electrocuted when the bass player vomits blood all over them, or when it starts raining?)

Not all of your readers speak the same language as you. You might be translating into some other languages, but probably not into all of the languages all your customers might prefer, so at least make it easier on them—use simplified global English, for example. Say things the same way each time. Use a limited vocabulary. Write short, simple sentences.



If you work in Agile, don’t just sit through a bunch of meetings

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Use your tech comms super powers for good!

write up the stories

Be the scrum master

take active part in the design discussions

ask the hard questions that make people realize they need to put some more thought into it


4. Sell t-shirts

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Sell souvenirs! T-shirts, mugs, hats, whatever. Sell stuff with your name on it. You make more money AND you turn all your fans into walking billboards for your band.


4. Sell t-shirts

Tell them what you did Why How it matters

What it’s worth

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4. Sell t-shirts

Explain the risks of not doing it (well)

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4. Sell t-shirts

Point out when the tail wags the dog

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Most people are used to thinking of the tech writers as a support service that sits downstream from the people who make the products and earn the money. But a great tech writer is influencing the products and their designs at least as much as any engineer! Don’t be afraid to point out when tech writers make a difference.

Especially don’t be afraid to point out when the tech writers lead a sweeping change in the customer experience.

For example, at Dolby, it was the tech writing groups that wanted to do away with publishing a bunch of PDFs that licensees download in a .zip file along with a bunch of other stuff. We wanted to build a website with live HTML content, where the information and the downloads would live together. Where you can search everything from one place. Where you can filter out the information relevant to you. Where you can give feedback about problems. Where you can count on finding the freshest information possible.

You’d think our sales operations and marketing departments would have wanted to build that, right? Well, of course they did, but that’s hard—so we had to take charge and get that ball rolling.

We are the tail wagging the dog.


5. Always be ready to play your greatest hits

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But wait—I have a bonus tip for you, #5. Always be ready to play your greatest hits.

There are some questions you need to be ready to answer on the spot. Practice your answers. You should be able to blurt these answers out in an elevator before the CEO has time to escape.


5. Always be ready to play your greatest hits

Be ready to answer: What is the value of doing it? What’s the cost of not doing it?

Why can’t we just hire some students to format this? What do you do, anyway?!

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Know the numbers.

How much did moving to your new content strategy cost? (tools + services + internal time * average salary)

How much did it cost to write that book? (average salary * months + investment from previous edition)

How much is it worth?

Sorry, but the answers here will take a little work. Here are the questions you can research. But sometimes it’s enough just to ask these questions and win a quick rhetorical victory:

What is faster time to market worth? What is a good review worth? How much are knowledgable customers worth? What is the cost of a lawsuit? How much does failure in the marketplace cost? How have tech support call volumes gone up or down?

Tech pubs, DITA, structured authoring, and you CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION © 2015 Dolby Laboratories, Inc. 20

Do you want some free samples of how to advertise what we do, or should we cut right to questions?


mission statement

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We explain Dolby's broadcast products and technologies with

clarity, completeness, accuracy, economy, and compassion to enable customer and licensee success.

Write a mission statement. You’re writers, you should be good at that!

Put it up on the walls. Put it on your team webpage—you have a team webpage, right?Put it in every slide deck you ever present. Put it in your email signature.


when we succeed, we:• reduce post-sale support costs • shorten licensees' time to market • reveal the potential of Dolby technologies

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Our mission statement goes on to spell out what success looks like.


when we fail, we:• confuse our customers, licensees, colleagues, and

selves • create headaches for the support organization • help put defective products into the market • want to hear about it

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and what failure looks like

Rockstars, not typists! © 2015 Dolby Laboratories, Inc. 24

This one is fun. My boss asked me for ONE SLIDE on what my group did last year.

ONE SLIDE!

Really?!

I can’t even!

So I put a year’s worth of team meeting notes in a word cloud generator and gave him this.


why do we need tech writers & docs?

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Take one half tablet every eight hours as needed for pain.

Do not take with alcohol.

Do not take if you are pregnant, have high blood pressure, or are allergic to milk.

This is great medicine. It’s the best medicine ever made. Do you want to take it?

Well, no—not without those details that a tech writer provided!


A brief message from our sponsor…We advance the science of sight and sound to create and enable spectacular experiences.

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I saved the best for last—what my boss’s boss says about documentation.

You probably know about us from the movies. You probably have our logo on a bunch of stuff in your living room—stereo, TV, home theater receiver, set top box. You might have our stuff in your laptop or tablet or phone.

You probably DON’T know that we don’t make any of that stuff. Or that our logo is also seen inside the broadcast truck, and at the TV station, and inside the cable company, and an the satellite company—and we don’t make any of that stuff either. Well, not much of it, anyway. We license all this stuff, and that means the tech writers at Dolby are explaining how to put the Dolby magic in all kinds of equipment, around the world.

Well. You can imagine what that’s like, explaining super complicated digital signal processing to engineers halfway around the world who are trying to design a new TV. They don’t necessarily know tons about audio—some do, but many don’t.

The head of the broadcast business at Dolby—my boss’s boss—told me once, “You know, in many cases our documentation IS the user interface to our products. It’s the only thing we actually give people.”

I should have asked for a raise on the spot!

erin vang - rockstars, not typists! expanding your influence in tech organizations; soap! 2015

Leadership & Management