Finding the right work to do: Lessons learnt from a year at a startup

Welcome to the second Write The Docs Cambridge meetup!

The agenda will be:

Arrive 5:45 for a 6pm start

Introduction

• What is Write The Docs (WTD)

• Who are you

• What do you want out of Write The Docs Cambridge

Finding the right work to do: Lessons learnt from a year at a startup - guest speaker talk with Beth Aitman (@baitman (https://twitter.com/baitman))

What really matters in tech writing? What should our goals be? How can we do the right thing for our users, and also show our companies that we’re valuable?

Technical writers tend to be stretched thin: there’s often more that we want to do than we ever possibly have time for. And because there’s too much to do, we have to compromise. Instead of prioritising based on who shouts the loudest, or what release goes out this week, you can prioritise based on what’s really important: what makes life better for our users.

Based on the lessons learnt from a year of working in a (sometimes chaotic) tech startup, this talk will discuss what the real aims of technical writing are, how to decide what work is actually useful, and how to demonstrate that your work makes a difference.

You will learn:

• how to discover what problems you should really work on
• ways to approach those problems that minimize wasted work
• how to tell whether what you’re doing is actually working for users

I like, I wish, I wonder

Workshop session following on from the themes raised in Beth's talk

8pm close