SPEAKER_01 0:08

Hello listeners. If you are curious about technical communications, then this podcast is for you. On each episode, I will interview a guest who will share the unique journey. This is Inside TechCom with Sohara Matavana. Let's get started. I recently attended a fascinating webinar titled Beyond the Publication, and I had to have the presenter on my show. I'm honored to welcome my first international guest, Steve Wiseman. Hi, Steve.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Honored to be here. I was touched when you asked. We all were, so we really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

What I would like for you to do is tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you kind of became a technical writer, if that's what you started with.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

We'll go the opposite way. How I became a technical writer and then the background because also my technical writer is quite simple. I'd finished a degree in England where I was born, close to Liverpool, kind of, where I studied. And then I came to Israel. I studied business information technology. So it's kind of what we are the connection between business and tech, where we were and where we still are, very much so. And the first job offer I got was being a technical writer. Now, what's funny is I don't think I can write very well. I can write better now than I did then. But when I got that job at 23, I wasn't a very good writer. I really wasn't. But that also taught me something about technical writing. That if you're a marketing writer or a copywriter, then you really do need to have fantastic English. But when you're a technical writer, the objective is more can you get the informate, the technical information, or the procedural information over in a way that the reader is able to read it? And that's the main thing. I'll give you an example. I don't know if I can mention the company. I was speaking to a friend of mine who works for one of the main enterprise companies in the world. We're talking about this, really more the idea of curating content rather than just writing it. But she said the way of the world, and this is interesting, it's happening to a lot of other companies, that this company actually lost intentionally a lot of their writers. They have a lot of their product managers or similar SMEs writing the content, then gets passed as some sort of writing process, as an editor, whatever, but they're not doing the same amount of work that we used to do as technical writers, and they push it out. So the quality of the content, maybe before it was 90%, maybe now it's 70, 80%, it's less so. But the point is, can they get the information out accurately and quickly? And that seems to be a change a bit in the market, which technical writers need to understand in order to keep their work and keep adding value. The companies are looking less at the quality of the language, just is it enough to get the message okay? And that's basically what I was when I started as a technical writer. I wasn't brilliant at writing, but I was good enough to get the message over and manage the process. So that's how I got into technical writing. First job in a new country, and I took it.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

What took you to Israel?

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Honestly, being Jewish.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

It's a Jewish country, and my grandfather lived here. I used to hate the place. I remember when I came when I was nine years old in the place called Kasaria where I used to live, which is a kind of a place where the prime minister lives. It's a very nice place, all rich houses. Unfortunately, he had a small flat. If you had a big house, I wouldn't be here and I would be very wealthy, but unfortunately, a small flat. I hated it, it was boring. There was nothing to do. And my friends wouldn't have believed that I came to live here. And then come 18, 19 years old, I happened to come three times in a year to visit him. I fell in love with the country, fell in love with what it's about, the whole history and everything related to it. And I said, I'm gonna give it a go before I get married. No responsibilities, nothing to lose, which is always the best way to do something.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

I came, got a job, friends, life, worked out very well.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

That's great. So you've been there for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Yeah, 28 years.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Awesome. Awesome. I would love to visit Israel someday. I've heard such fascinating stories about it from my husband who has visited. So someday we shall meet.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Well, on behalf of the whole country, we all welcome you.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Oh, thank you. I'm gonna meet you first then. I would love to. You know, you made some interesting comments about technical writing. You don't need to be a great writer. You just need to be able to communicate. And then you also kind of commented about how companies are starting to quote unquote compromise on the quality. If it was 90%, it's it is 70% and it is it is good enough. Would you say that this is now you're my first international guest that I'm talking to? And I have been a technical writer only in the United States. And quality is something that I focus on, extremely important to me. Now, is this a trend that you're probably seeing in other countries, or is this across the board now that you've been in the industry?

SPEAKER_00 5:16

So, first of all, when I speak, I'm not talking about Israel. Israel is such a especially with what I'm doing with Poligo. I'm completely international as far as I'm concerned with the people I speak to. Okay, so my opinions are coming from speaking to companies all over the world. I don't know if I could pick up from other companies the same message exactly that I got from my friend of mine. But also she would tell me things that, you know, if I'm speaking to a prospect or a customer, they probably wouldn't tell me. She's a friend, so she tells me the inside, you know, dealings of what's going on that I wouldn't necessarily hear. But I'll tell you one thing that I certainly has changed, and I think it is part of it, and it's probably right what she says is that when I started, collaboration was printing something out, giving a whole book to two or three people and getting some reviews and pasting them back into Word or FrameMaker, and that was it. The whole world has changed with collaboration. Right nowadays, the days of sitting for two hours with an SME kind of have gone. You send them some sort of assignment to give you information, and then you bring it back into the system, right? Edit it, do your magic, and then send it out to review. So it's not so far anyway from what I'm describing as how most people work. We don't write the content anymore, often from scratch. Of course. Offering accessing what other people have written and then putting it together. So it is that type of workload, even if it's not quite as extreme as the example I gave. I think most people are working in that direction. I love the word curating content, because that's what a lot of the time we're doing. You're less writing from scratch, you're putting it together, you're making it coherent, right? You're making it organized, you're adding the missing information that other people didn't put in that you realize your users need to know.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Agreed. Absolutely. I think curating content is a good way to describe what we are doing because remember, we are creative plagiarists, right? We take the content somebody else has created and then we put our magic touch to it. But that magic touch is where our skill, I suppose, comes in. And since the goal of my podcast is to cater to listeners who may be trying to get into this field or who are career changers, I want to give them a sense of what technical communications is. And I do want them to, I guess, recognize that even though the quality of your writing, I think that's a debatable, right? It's it's moot. It's debatable what we are talking about, whether companies want it 70% or 90%. You do need to have writing skills. Even if you're going to take content and curate it, you need to bring a special skill set to that. In your opinion, when we say that you don't need to be a good writer, are we trivializing the profession of technical communications?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

It's good you brought that up, because if you didn't, you're right, it'd get the wrong message. Right. So very, very good in cloud. In that webinar that you heard, I actually used an expression, the science of technical writing. Right? Yes. Which is probably an answer to your question. We were specifically talking and a little bit being humorous about the idea of writing.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

But but there's much more to it. Thank you for saying that. Yes. It's the but I would actually use that. It's not all about writing. The amount of time that someone spends writing is probably not as much time as they spend doing everything else. The management, the organization, you know, working at how to put things together, strategy, structure, architecture, the review process, and everything, the versioning, everything that goes with it. There's no question about it. Technical writing is a skill. And in that webinar, my whole argument was that the content is the driver between our for a whole company, every single department, human resources, legal, development, support. Content is the driver. But most people don't recognize there's a recognize there's a science to how things work properly, processes, workflows, they need to be the importance of recognizing its effect. And most companies don't do that. The technical writer today, I think, needs to recognize that, have those skills where writing is only a part of it. Sometimes in my demos, I kind of say we're project managers. And that's in a lot of cases what a technical writer does. Because they have to manage all the different departments who are providing or having some say in the content creation process. And you have to manage that. And it's human management. What happens when you've got this developer who really is a bit narky? He or she, okay. No, it's he's being narky, so we'll call him a he. I can get away with it in this time, right? If I'm nice, I've got to say he or she.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Yeah, let's say it's a he. Because generally there's a he.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

So you have to know how to deal with that. What you're gonna do. So no, there's a content creation, maybe is less than it was 20 years ago. But the management of the whole process and everything that surrounds it that I just described, that is much more than it used to be. So I'm very glad you brought up that question because otherwise it would have come out with absolutely the wrong impression.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Absolutely. And I mean, I see the distinction. I just wanted to kind of dig into it a little more so that you could clarify what you meant by it. And thank you for kind of placing it in a context. It was not a trivialize. And and yes, I've been a technical writer for a while, and I have seen how content curation is just a very small aspect. Uh, that curation is a process in itself. The science of technical writing, if I may say so, the webinar that I attended of yours, my takeaway was how the tech pubs or technical communications or documentation, whatever your company calls your department, is looked at uh as a cost center. And the tips that you gave in your webinar started making me think how we can become profit centers.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

Like a beacon for the company.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

A beacon for the company. Yes. And I mean, those were some of the takeaways that I had from your webinar. And it it just placed technical communications in a very interesting context to me from business perspective. How do you come at it from the business side?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Well, I I love it because when I started, content was I've got to write a manual. I've got putting a product out, got no choice, got to write the documentation. Will anybody read it? I don't know. Is it in the right format for them? Is it accessible? I don't know. Do I care? No. It wasn't even in the roadmap. I remember most companies that I worked for originally, it wasn't even on the roadmap. Writing and translation were these afterthoughts all the time. But now, if you look at it in the right way, people have begun to appreciate the business value of content. They realize its importance, but not just from a marketing perspective. Obviously, someone's writing a website, putting a brochure, it's obvious to everybody that content is what will bring or help bring or not help bring in your sales, right? That everybody understands. But people now appreciate a couple of things. One, in technical content itself, how important it is with the process. Onboarding, support, you can improve your pre-sales by actual excellent technical content. That someone says, say you've got a product that integrates with Salesforce, and they're looking for, I don't know, A B C type of technology with Salesforce, and your product happens to go in there, one of the support questions, you might bring in a lead. I actually sometimes encourage customers to maybe put even a some sort of demo link on their help page, maybe their head or the footer. So if someone comes there, then they you can potentially generate business. As a technical writer, I think it's a wonderful thing to do. Because if you can get statistics and actual say, okay, over the last month, we've had 15 new leads because they came to tech to the via the technical content. You have to become much more than a cost center in your language, you've again become a beacon to the company by by doing such a thing. There's little things like that that help. But that's on a technical content side. Um what I was talking about a lot on that in that webinar was people just don't see the everywhere in the company, they don't see the value of content. They don't see the value of reusing content. You know, for example, you as a tech writer, you wrote a beautiful introduction, you explained the product in a simple way, and but nobody else has the access to use that same content. When sales are putting an RFP or a proposal together, they should be reusing that same content. Other places should. Or QA should be using your same procedural documentation for creating their test documents. What I found, you know what dams are, where they're systems where I think it's digital asset management, where there's a lot of systems out there where a single source of delivery content, so like on SharePoint, you'll put all your PDFs or all your whatever it is, people to access. But where do companies have a single source of source content for people to share? They don't. And from a business perspective, the CEO should be saying everybody in the company should be reusing the same content as much as possible. Don't try and reinvent it. Because if we all reinvent the same type of content, we very get it wrong. Don't put it in the same way. You know, all the time that somebody put in invested into writing that content in the first place, it's all wasted because it was used once and never again. Right. People understand the business benefit of using and reusing content of the whole company. It saves time, it saves money, and the continual messaging, you know, the subtle ways you know drive things into people's minds, you can do that. And you can do that. And the skills of a technical writer allow companies to do it because they can't they wouldn't do it without the skills of us. We talked about the science. I kind of repeat a bit the conference, the webinar, sorry, but the other the skills that we have, if you can teach it around the company, everybody benefits and you become the beacon again.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Now, you know, a couple of things. One is you talked about how technical content can contribute to business value. But as a technical writer, I have attended your webinar, but for the sake of our listeners, can you summarize? I mean, what skills? It's sometimes it's very hard. Technical writers, and I don't want to stereotype technical writers, but I'm putting myself out there. I'm introverted, I tend to not see the business value that my content can bring. What would you tell writers? What should we work on? What skill should we work on, or how do we go about it to show the value in our content?

SPEAKER_00 15:56

So the first thing is I think is to recognize when you've got a skill. Let's say, for example, you started playing piano or the guitar or you play tennis like I do, whatever I do, right? And you think I'm not very good, right? I keep losing to the person I'm playing against. Right? But you can play a forehand and a backhand and volley, but you're not great. And then you go and play against someone who's never hit a tennis ball before. You realize you know what you're doing. It's just compared to someone else, you've put yourself in a negative place, less self-confidence about this particular issue. But generally, people don't recognize the immense skills they have in nearly everything they do. That's just a general thing in life. People should realize that everybody is amazing. They really are. Everybody can do things that have a skill set, everything in life. Nobody should undervalue themselves in any way whatsoever in any form of life.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

That's I think that's a great message. Absolutely. I mean, that's I think the second part of my question is let's say I recognize, I mean, I recognize my skill set. I'm confident. But then how do I articulate? We are great at curating content that somebody gives us, but then we also have to sell that curated content as having business value.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

So the first thing we need to do is recognize what our skills are. And we mentioned them before. We're managers. We know how to get the most out of content. We know how to reuse content, we know how to work inside processes, we know how to interact with other people, we know how to motivate sometimes other people to provide us content because if we don't get that content, we can't finish our work. We have a huge amount of skills. That's the first thing to recognize, as you as you said. My example was you don't know what you've got, but you really have it. So once you recognize that, and you suddenly look in the wider company and recognize the same pain points, like our pain points 20 years ago, no reusable content, no proper workflows, translation was a huge mess. And I've suffered from manual translation processes, and they're an absolute nightmare when mentioned products. But when you suddenly see, wait a second, everybody else in the company has the same problems as we had before we said using great products, right? Right. So as soon as you come to that realization, I mean one of the things I found in life, you asked a big question, you know, how can we help the big business? That's a big question. It's a very hard question to jump from A to Z. You have to do things in stages. We realize A, we've got skills, B, we look around the company and we see everybody's suffered from where I've suffered as well. Maybe not the same company in the past from experience or other people in our creative plagiarist industry that we have. That them as if anyone's joining late, we mean technical writers. I think you have to write wind back to see where that expression came from. Right, right. Once you do it in stages, you suddenly realize, okay, I realize everyone else has the same problem as me. Then it's not so hard to go. If you need to speak to somebody, it's always helpful when you've got something in common. And now you recognize you've got something in common. It's not such a hard job now to get, oh, yeah, I see there's a problem with this. Maybe I can help you because we've done this before. And it's about the we mentioned the business balance before, Joan. I mean, it's we basically want to reuse content, make it more efficient, make the messaging clear to a company, reduce wasted costs.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

I think that's a good point.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

We've been there before, and we'll now help you to do it. It's not such a big jump when you take it in stages. Maybe that we discussed in the webinar how to go about it, et cetera, et cetera. But conceptually, when we were discussing it, the person Andy Francis, who basically she gets us just as much, if not more, of the kudos for this, because she put a lot of it together. I was just the voice side of it. It was she was telling me, don't make the writer sound like they can be a big star. Not everybody wants to be a good star. And I'm saying, give the writer strength, right? It'll make them a big star in the company. That'll be amazing. That'll be no, not everyone's like that. Not everyone's like me. Right? As you say, you're more introverted. Obviously, you're not that introverted, but you're running a podcast, right? So you're gonna but there were ways to do it. Can I ask you a question? Absolutely. Is this podcast just a natural next step for you, or is it something you're really challenging yourself to make yourself do it?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Happy to answer that. I think it is really to challenge myself. So I'm really stepping outside my comfort zone here.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

That's what I thought from what you're saying. I think that's tremendously impressive. And it also makes it genuine. You know, you're not some people can do this kind of thing for the starter, for name. You're doing it for yourself. You're doing it to challenge yourself to become a better person and to get more skills. And I think that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, and I appreciate the support that I'm getting.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

100%. You know, I think I'm kind of scared for all the courses that people are doing. Uh people are running because you can now get so much information without doing courses. Not in a systematic way, but it's also more real and it's in smaller chunks. So you I mean, I'm trying to get into the property ladder a little bit. And you don't need to take a course, you just need to speak to mortgage brokers and agents, and you pick it up on the way.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Again, my husband was a CTO of a company, of a startup. Now he's completely jumped ship, he's into real estate. And everything that you just said, right, where you learn on the go, hands-on, that's exactly what he's done to be where he is. That has motivated me. I'm like, why am I so scared? I need to learn from him. You know, just go with the flow.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

But you know what? This is a really good example of because really what you're dealing with is still content. It's verbal content right now, but it's content. It's just an example of another skill of the science of technical writing that I don't think the regular technical writer needs to learn it. But it's it's an example of managing content in a different way, being creative, accessing, and you'll just become. Better as a person in the job that you do, and you never know which direction you'll take after something like this, which is very exciting. But it's still content management. Everything walks around, every podcast, every customer or internal interaction. It's all part of the story that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Everything that you just said is so fascinating to me because content is not just the written word. Content is being created around you all the time. And this is one aspect of how you can create content and how you can curate it. So thank you for actually sharing, throwing light on that, you know, on that what content looks like. Content is not just the written word.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

We can get it wrong sometimes, you know, because I remember a few years ago, there's a there's a technical writing conference in Israel. And a couple of people got up when YouTube just came out and they said, video is the future of technical writing. There'll be no more written word, everything will be done by videos. And I was thinking, oh, I here we are. Here's another person jumping on the bandwagon of the latest technology, having a clue of where it fits in. And a lot of people do that, and I was proven right. Videos are an excellent source of content, but everything has to have its time and place. You have to know. I often use this expression, you know, content roadmap. When you're bringing content out, say for a new product, you have to work out what type of content am I using different places. You might have something like Walkme for you know for the onboarding, you might have a help center, you might have some videos, tutorials, learning management system. A podcast can also be a big part of it. Or these kind of recorded videos, right? Because people will learn from these types of things as well. So all of the different types of content delivery help part the picture, but not one of them is going to take is going to take over the whole game. I mean, written word is always going to have a huge part because you just it's just more efficient when you know the product to read words than it is to listen to a half an hour speech. I'll give you an example where it's not the case. Let's say you're creating an API guide. Imagine doing that all in video.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Yeah, very good example there. You you would not want to see that in video. That's right. Very true. Yeah, very true. Good points there, Steve. This is a great conversation going on. But in the interest of time, I want to go back to your background because what you told us was how you started off as a technical writer. But you also been an entrepreneur. And to me, that is something that I would love to do, but I don't know how to go about it. And I'm so scared. So please share your journey with us.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

So I'll I'll send you the contract to be a partner after after this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

I would love to. I would love to.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

No, I mean again, everything's been natural for me in my life, including coming to Israel, it was just a natural step that I took. It wasn't a big deal. I worked in a very quite a big company for a couple of years as a writer, and I made contacts. And I was getting bored just doing the writing because you can see my character's a bit, I want to do all sorts of other things. So I became independent. And for becoming independent, got a few more customers, so I became a company. Okay, I can't handle all those companies, so I'll bring a couple of people in. I've never been a big company, I'm a small company. And now, you know, 95% of my maybe that's too much, 90% of my time, I'm the uh product evangelist for Poligo because my business skills they work together because it's a fantastic technical writing product, and I've also got the business side to sell and be involved in that side. That's where I came into it. But I've been through all I used to I've sold to large companies like Microsoft and Intel, those types of services, technical writing services down the line. But helps with them being in Israel because it made it easier. Now I'm more international, but then I was very much localized. I've sold Zendesk, so I know customer experience, I know customer support, which which is thinking if you want to talk about, I think is huge. You know, the people have to realize that content is the customer journey and the content journey basically are parallel. They work, most of it is about content, a lot of that journey, which a lot of people don't realize. The integration with support, right? That's huge. I often say support, training, and tech docs are brothers and sisters or twins, whatever, or triplets, whatever you want to call them, because they really are doing all the same things. And I find it quite astonishing that they're not so closely integrated. I mean the product that in Pligo that they kind of are, but in the market, people do not see them together. If you ask Tech Doc, they don't necessarily know they're the long-lost siblings, right? Our training and support, they don't see it that way, but they are, it's all exactly the same content, and that's what I've learned through what I've been doing. The market's following kind of my journey, because people do realize I'm not I'm not saying stuff that no one's thought about before. But there are a lot of people who don't think about it. That's my journey to where I am now.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Okay. I mean, what you said was that this has been a natural journey for you. But how did a business idea come to your mind? How did you know that this is the business that I want to do? Did you recognize a need? Did you see a need that you were trying to fulfill?

SPEAKER_00 27:04

I'd love to say that, but I'm not like that. I think things do, but I do follow like technical writing is my base knowledge. That's what I know. So it makes sense to build a business around that knowledge, right? It's I don't have these big, massive, beautiful visions. It's not the way that I work. Maybe if I did, I'd be a multimillionaire by now. I follow what seems to be the right path at the right time. And using my knowledge, but in a business capacity to build a small business, that made sense to me.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

And being able to resell a product like Zendesk, when that idea came along, I thought was phenomenal because that just took me into a different type of industry where they didn't fully understand content. In that product, they have a help center, but don't really understand content. That's what I saw an opportunity in there to go to. I even spoke at the Zendesk Relate conferences, explaining them how to write content in their help centers. Again, more of a natural progressions.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Got it. I think the way I'm processing this information is life has presented me with opportunities too. But it's you have responded to that opportunity, and I haven't. And I think the takeaway for me personally is maybe you know, when opportunity comes knocking, and if your heart is in it even a little bit, you want to respond to it. And it may take you some places that you wouldn't have been. And that's my takeaway, honestly. I don't know what how our listeners would respond to this, but I think I'm just trying to put a little context around that, some messaging around that. Is as a writer, sometimes we are very siloed, we are very internal looking. And it is important for us to respond to opportunities, whether be it in your company or be opportunities for entrepreneurial opportunities, to kind of respond to that and to follow your gut sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

So first of all, I don't think you're not a risk taker because you're doing this, as we've said. So I think I think you've got more entrepreneurial bones than you think you have.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

Probably. As I, you know, as I mentioned, this was really to push myself. And thank you for appreciating that. I'm definitely taking more risks as the grays appear.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Yeah. I know you're piming. But I think someone who's a huge risk taker would have taken much more risk than I have. It's going with your gut, but you can't just go with your gut because if you go with your gut, you might get it wrong. Ever believe that? Everything has to be thought through carefully. Okay. What you can often have are opportunities that aren't a huge amount of risk. Like I've built a business where I I basically pay people by the hour. I haven't had to invest, take a loan of a million dollars to get a business going. So maybe if I did, the company would be 300 people by now. I don't want a business like that. My family life doesn't work around that way. We don't take a certain amount of risk, but but not too much. Opportunities come, like selling Zendesk, there was no risk. It's only a risk of my time, nothing else. Right? Sometimes you get opportunities that you can take without a huge risk. And as you say, you don't know where it'll take you. But to think them through, not be too scared. Like when we spoke about the podcast at the beginning, about I'm not really fearful about doing this type of thing. I'm not bothered if it if it goes wrong, because it's all I gave you something as well before, but what I always think about life is what is the worst thing that can happen if something goes wrong? Your family will stay fine. Like let's say I mess up in this this today, the family will still be fine, they'll still be healthy, right? Nothing really bad will happen apart. Steve will be embarrassed. Well, Steve doesn't actually really care about that. Maybe other people do a bit more, but I really don't care. I've been embarrassed so many times. I say so, no, I don't say so many stupid. But when you speak as much as I do, you know you put your foot in your mouth. It's like it's it's half expected.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

I like that. I mean, you're really comfortable. You're here, you know, I think you've kind of just going with the flow. And this is allowing me to do that. It's okay to put your foot in your mouth and you still get on with life because life, it's as you said, it's not going to impact your family life. And people might laugh about it for a second or two. But you, your learning out of it is to me, the learning that I'm getting out of this is more important than anything else. I'm not going to look at it as failure, is what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

That's right. That's right. Everything's an experience and it makes you better.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

It makes you better, exactly. I want to come back to the triplet analogy that you gave. Because I I am a big I'm originally from India. And to me, Bollywood movies, if you've heard about them, I've never seen one, but yes, I've heard of them. Yeah, and some of these, I mean, they are insufferable, and I wouldn't recommend. These are some of the movies from even before I was born. But the storyline would be there would be two or three brothers and they were lost, and then they discover each other many, many years later. To me, when you were giving this analogy of the twins or the triplets, that theme was running through my mind. But from a content perspective, I definitely want you to touch upon that. What is it that you wanted to share?

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Well, basically, if you think of the content, all of them are dealing with answering customers' questions and helping them on board the product. The tech docs are writing the procedural content, let's say. I mean, there's more to it than that, but let's just, for the sake of argument, it's more procedural content. The trainers are going to use that same content, but maybe in a slightly different way. They'll put it maybe in presentations, they'll put it in tutorials, they'll be putting a slide deck together and speaking over with workshops and putting workbooks together, but it's the same general content. How do I use the product? That's what training is the same as tech docs.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Tech docs, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

Maybe deck docs could be some sort of interesting phrase. And support is just part of that same journey. It's often less of how can I start using the product? Because that's more training. But support is okay, how do I continue using the product? And that is the same stuff again you write as a tech writer. Because we're covering both. Excuse me. We're covering the source or getting somebody into the product, the onboarding process, but we're also dealing with when they're using it, you know, helping them find content, you know, to answer their specific question. That's what support is. It's the same thing. Right. I mean, part of a workflow should be okay when there's task-oriented content, which is the easier to write, and there's also content that we should be writing in relation to what support agents get, the tickets that company get. There should always be a workflow, which there often isn't in a company. An agent gets a ticket. It could be something very specific, you know, do we support Microsoft or what version of Microsoft do we support? And the question keeps coming up, and it's not in your tech docs. So it's something to suddenly, you know, it's a ticket that comes up. It's something we haven't covered because we can't cover everything. You can cover the general ideas, but all the specifics you cannot cover when you're writing documentation. But if you have a workflow to get content from support, bring it back into tech docs. And again, the 70-90% of quality rule is relevant here as well. Just get it out quickly. The sooner I get it out, the less ticket. For those of you on it, there's a term called ticket deflection. It means putting content there to deflect the ticket rather than somebody sending a ticket into an agent, because it's much cheaper to provide content than it is for human beings to go and have to answer, investigate, and whatever with the with the question. It can take some time. So once you've learned that, have it noted, have a workflow, get it to the content curators, get it out as quick as you can onto your help portal, your knowledge base, or whatever you call it, and then the next person who asked that same question will get an answer to it. But so it's all related. So training is more free, support is more, you know, a bit often, maybe at the beginning, but often a bit more advanced, and tech docs covers both of those scenarios. So that's why I see they're very much as triplets.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

And as you were sharing the commonalities across these departments, it became clear to me that what I should be doing in my role to look at the workflow, you know, kind of take a step back. We are so in the weeds. What's that saying? You're losing the forest for the trees. And that's the view that you're trying to kind of bring to our attention that you need to take a step back and look at how content flows and how you can respond to both training and support.

SPEAKER_00 35:23

Can I give you another example? Can I give you another the forest and the trees? And I had this literally with a company last week. So part of Poligo is if if I'm allowed to say it, it's a structured authoring product and it's based on DocBook rather than Ditter. And I often get these questions, go, why docbook? Ditta's more famous, and that people can have all these specific questions about Ditta. And I say, just wait a second. Okay? Let's move away from the discussion of which one's better, right? There's no like um lollipop surprise for someone who wins the argument or ditter's gonna suddenly go and get an Emmy or something. It's not gonna happen. You know, it doesn't really matter which XML it is or how it's done or how you do a variable. What matters is is can I author in an efficient way? Can I collaborate an efficient way? Can I distribute my content in an efficient way or an effective way for the users? They should be the questions, but often tech writers who've been in the market for a long time, a long history of these issues, we we can forget it. We completely see this wood of so much, but don't really pick out what's important. What's important is usability and effectiveness for the customer. Not is it this or is it this and can it do this and is it that? Oh no, but you can't press the yellow button with green dots on. Oh, I'm not having a product I can't do that for. That's not the point. And you know, I had this discussion with a company very on late Thursday night, my time, and I had to say it to them. It's but please think about the usability for yourselves and the customers. You know, does the product do, is it answering your pain points? Is it gonna give you something you haven't got already? Are you gonna save money and time by doing things more efficiently? They're the questions you need to ask.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

I tend to sometimes get lost in the details, but you as a writer are not looking at it holistically. And that is what I'm trying to remind myself that it's right, at the end of the day, you want to communicate efficiently and effectively to the audience. And the touch points are all these different departments, and you need to be interacting with these departments to make your content better. And you could save so much of your work probably if you just coordinated and worked in tandem rather than in a siloed manner.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

100%. And to get others to often to get others to to agree to that or to be part of it is they have to see tangible benefits. They have to understand what you're gonna provide to them, which we've discussed a little bit already. But when you can show you're gonna become more efficient, you're gonna save time, right? You're gonna be able to produce better documents, your process are gonna be more efficient, they'll listen to you. If you say to someone, yeah, I've got this great product, it's got very technical technical writer could do this, and I've seen them do this. They go to the CEO, yeah, but if you haven't used variables, yeah, variables are great, and conditional text is gonna make the company fly. The CEO will close the door on them as quick as they possibly can. But if the person goes and says, We can actually save the company money, probably in potentially increase sales, increase reusable content, have the same messaging. Now the CEO's ear opens and he listens to you.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Because every information that you have shared or that we've talked about has been absolutely relevant. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

SPEAKER_00 38:39

We've had a conversation. So I I respond to conversation. So and the way to make me quiet is to ask me a completely general question, anything I want to add.

SPEAKER_01 38:48

And that's exactly what I did.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

So I don't have so I don't have anything to add apart from me saying you said you are on it. I'm honored. I mean, I don't normally do this kind of stuff to be asked to go on such an international postcast, which I'm sure is going to be really popular when it comes out. We're honored. It's I've just sat down for an hour and chatted with you. I've not done anything else but chat with you, and I loved it.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

I thought I was talking to a friend. Yeah, that I'm meeting after a long, long time. So this was a great conversation, Steve. Thank you so much for your time. And I have learned so much personally. And I pleasure. And I look forward to signing that contract with you. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share on your social media to help me reach a wider audience. Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app, including Apple, Google, or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter at inside techcom or visit us at www.inside techcom.show for the latest updates. Catch you on another episode.