The Documentation Product Owner

Technical writers can be instrumental in driving customer value of a product just as product managers and strategists. Writers must own the documentation life cycle, from gathering customer feedback to better understand their goals, to over time building a deep knowledge of their day-in-the-life leading to awareness of how customers use documentation.

Writers can directly engage customers by listening to them and improving documentation continuously as a living and evolving product.

Just like a product, the documentation matures as writers gain knowledge of customer use cases and document workarounds, best practices, focused examples, and tutorials to enable readers to get the most from their product investment.

About the speaker:

Sreya is a technical writer with Clover (https://www.clover.com/) Developer Relations in Sunnyvale, California. She owns documentation for developers who build apps for Clover’s point of sale systems. Sreya’s 20 years of experience distributed in technical writing and curriculum development provides her with a learning-oriented perspective when approaching documentation.

Before that, Sreya led the Oracle Project Management Cloud information development team based in Hyderabad, India. Her team was responsible for business process, API documentation, and curriculum. She was an Agile evangelist and she collaborated with global product management and engineering leadership to guide the transition from waterfall to Agile/Scrum practices. She was also the documentation lead for accessibility.

Outside of work, Sreya spends time volunteering with the Environmental Volunteers (https://www.evols.org/) to teach foundational science and encourage scientific thinking to school children in California.

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Taking a step back: Analysing your documentation

One thing the pandemic has forced many of us to do is to take a step back. To just stop for a moment and think about where we are. And while you are taking stock of your personal life, let me talk you through taking stock of your professional life, or at least the bits of it you have managed to document. In the hustle of the beforetimes, documentation was often a forgotten or sidelined thing that you could do roughly now, fix later, or just never quite get around to. Take a deep breath, look around your home office, give the dog a pat, and let's work out what you have, what you need, and how you can open a can of Marie Kondo on all of it.

About the speaker:

Lana has been writing open source documentation for much longer than she or anyone else cares to think about, and is currently gainfully employed by SUSE. She is passionate about great writing, information architecture, content strategy, docs as code, and Agile documentation. She is currently riding out the pandemic at her home in Brisbane, Australia, where she lives with a teenager and a mentally challenged but often adorable feline. Sometimes the teenager is adorable, too.