The Secret Sauce Every New Startup Should Have: An Exceptional Technical Writer

Documentation is often considered as “nice to have” in the early stage startup while a documentation expert is considered a superfluous luxury. But can an early stage startup truly afford to go without a documentation expert?

So much has been written about hiring the right team for early-stage startups. These startups buzz with genius: passionate, bright minds that can turn a spectacular vision into real-life solution for a demanding market. Early stage startups will often take on T-shaped people, focusing on one area of expertise while boasting a broad range of supporting knowledge and skills. It is thus assumed that these shrewd men and women are also effective writing communicators when addressing their respective stakeholders. While communication is a shared goal for everyone in the startup, it’s hardly ever considered as a single, over-arching goal until much later in the game, if at all.

Disparate communication leads to inconsistency and ambiguity

Without this over-arching view of communication, the early stage startup faces three challenges. First, different functions are talking about the venture and its products in different ways, leading to inconsistency which breeds ambiguity. Second, the bright, T-shaped startup personnel rely on their broader skills to write. Lacking writing training, their communication is not optimized for increased productivity and enhanced user experience (UX). So, even if they have the knack for it, writing is not what they signed up for nor what they enjoy doing; it is perceived more as a necessary evil and by some – even a kill joy. Lastly, with different functions developing different documentation, the documentation wheel is invented and reinvented multiple times, leading to a resource redundancy.

Clear documentation boosts productivity and enhances user experience

Clear documentation is not “nice to have” for the early stage startup’s survival. It’s a MUST. First, and foremost, it captures in writing ideas, approaches, strategies, guidelines, policies, and other business information. It is the vault of the startup’s legacy, which, when managed well, is easily accessible to all functions in the startup. To name just a few of the advantages of having easily accessible documentation:

1. A single source of information is profitable; it saves time and energy otherwise wasted in seeking for that same information and figuring out who might own that particular piece of information.
2. Documentation boosts productivity. When one function in the startup has already thought it up and that fact is known to all, there’s no need to rethink or reinvent it.
3. Documentation lowers risk. Clear documentation serves both internal and external stakeholders by providing well-defined guidelines, instructions, processes, and procedures, which reduce the risk of human error.
4. Documentation ensures continuity. Documentation shortens onboarding of new personnel and training of existing staff while increasing the effectiveness of their learning. It ensures that operations may continue even at the face of employee absence or turnover.
5. Documentation increases consistency. Having consistent results increases validity and reliability of products, which, in turn, increases their marketability.
6. Documentation sets boundaries. Documentation delineates the scope of projects and services thereby aligning expectations of stakeholders.

The value of a technical writer is greater than the sum of their documentation

Placed low on the prioritization list, documentation is often the underdog of early stage startups. Yet, by building clear documentation, a technical writer creates value, saving time, money, and other resources while boosting profitability, credibility, and serviceability. A technical writer is a documentation expert who is able to develop audience-specific oriented documentation. The unique perspective and problem-solving skills of technical writers apply to a wide range of documentation ranging from specs and high-level design to low-level design, user interface (UI), user guides, white papers, processes, and procedures. An exceptional technical writer will leverage the entire organization in several ways by:

1. Simplifying complex ideas thereby making them easily digestible ideas that are accessible to any audience.
2. Releasing the subject matter experts (SMEs) from the undesirable documentation task with minimal interference or burdening of the SMEs.
3. Boosting productivity by finding errors, simplifying processes, and enhancing the UX of products and processes.
4. Collating information across the organization, resolving ambiguities and ensuring clarity, and a single, unified language among all functions.
5. Managing a centralized vault of documentation for the early stage startup, the exceptional technical writer will help foster a culture of information-sharing in the organization. Communication channels opened by the exceptional technical writer between founders, marketer, and engineers will serve from early stage, progressing to more mature ones.
6. Being involved in different levels of thinking – from strategy and high level design to low level design and microcopy – and different functional perspectives in the organization, the exceptional technical writer may be considered as a “communication wingman” or consultant who has a unique approach to problem solving.
7. Being curious and playing the devil’s advocate, an exceptional technical writer will not merely document processes and procedures, but will help shape their development.

The Secret Sauce

Startups would use their resources wisely by hiring a strong, experienced technical writer early on. Seeing the products and services of the startup through the eyes of different functions in the organization, the seasoned technical writer can easily help founders, leaders, and marketers better describe the uniqueness of the product and the ways by which it addresses the market gap it aims to resolve. They will ensure the flow of information and the ability to repurpose content produced by different functions in the organization from the very beginning; they increase productivity while collating the organizations’ various resources. When chosen well, an exceptional technical writer becomes the secret sauce every new startup should have.

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Contemplating whether to hire a technical writer for your early stage startup?

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