Applying Engineering Principles to Technical Writing
summary
Argues that technical writing is engineering problem solving and gives concrete practices: model systems as an engineering blackbox, inventory inputs and outputs, identify team needs, build documentation backbones and templates and a style guide as tools, centralize content in a single source of Truth, use user feedback and analytics to validate claims, prefer accuracy over precision in early stages, treat docs as part of the agile workflow, and stop chasing perfection by using reviews pragmatically so documentation ships and actually lets users and engineers complete tasks.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:46Engineering principles for tech writing
- 1:53Engineering black box
- 5:50Black boxes in teams
- 7:42Collaboration in engineering
- 9:06Engineering design process
- 10:08Defining the problem
- 12:58Gathering information
- 15:34Exploring solutions
- 17:44Developing documentation
- 19:09User-focused documentation
- 20:53Tech writing as problem solving
- 21:38Q&A: Product decisions
- 23:48Q&A: Credibility with data
- 25:31Q&A: Perfectionism
- 26:57Q&A: Skipping discovery
- 28:02Q&A: Collaboration over competition
- 29:08Q&A: Encouraging contributions
- 29:50Q&A: Release notes
- 30:54Q&A: Docs in agile workflows
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