How Do Today's Technical Writers Get Things Done?

Join us for a meetup focused on the tools, workflows, and systems that help technical writers scale their impact, collaborate across teams, and grow in their careers! We have four speakers lined up:

Speaker Lineup

Speaker: Renée Carignan
Company: Gem
Role: Lead Technical Writer
Title: Find the frequency: metrics for better docs and happier readers (2025 edition)
Description: (This is my Write The Docs Australia 2023 talk, updated for 2025 + slimmed down time-wise for this meetup!) When it comes to quantifying the "success" of documentation, trying to use metrics to figure out if your docs are actually helping people can be a daunting and frustrating task.

Most analytics tools were built primarily with marketers and product managers in mind, and sorting through the near-infinite analytics features has lead many a documentarian to spend too much time tuned into metrics that don't result in any tangible docs improvements. In this talk, I'll share my insights into which metrics can provide the most value for you as a docs writer based on my 6+ years leading the docs team at two product analytics software companies.

Through lots of trial, error, and writing meta-docs about analytics while grappling with them myself, I managed to suss out several metrics which consistently resulted in tangible docs improvements that made us (and our readers) happier. By the end of this talk, you'll have a handy list of metrics which may prove beneficial for your team, and a strengthened intuition for when a metric is simply noise to tune out - and what may be worth tuning into.

Speaker: Adam Wood
Company: Martian
Role: Technical Writer / Developer Relations
Title: 2 Fast 2 Purpureous
Description: LLMs can write technical documentation way faster than human writers can. But the results are often a particular form of "purple prose" - overly elaborate, ornate text that doesn't get at what you are trying to actually write.
This talk will look at which parts of documentation writing can be automated, which can be assisted, and which are best left (for now) to human artisans.

Speaker: Frances Liu
Company: Promptless
Role: Co-Founder, a former Head of Product
Title: How to get unblocked as a documentarian
Description: As a former head of product, I was terrible at enabling our technical writer. I had context on the feature releases, but not what's in the docs, and our writer knows the docs inside-out (including the screenshots), but doesn't always know what the feature really is about. In this talk, I want to share some tools and systems that can help documentarians stay in the loop without getting overwhelmed, gather necessary context, and hold SMEs accountable.

Speaker: Sarah Deaton
Company: WRITER
Role: Developer Experience
Title: Context engineering for docs teams: onboarding humans AND AI
Description: What if the same guides that help your new teammate ramp up could also make your AI tools smarter? In this talk, I'll share how setting up basic onboarding materials—style guides, linting rules, and process docs—unexpectedly transformed my AI tools from unreliable assistants into collaborative teammates. You'll learn practical ways to build context once and get compounding returns from both human writers and AI tools like Cursor and CodeRabbit.

• Getting There
• BART: Closest station is Montgomery (598 Market St)
• Muni: Closest stop is Market St and Sansome St, approximately 0.5 miles away
• Driving: Use SpotHero for parking, or consider Uber or Lyft for convenience

Sponsored by Writer and organized by Words n Logic.