#TechnicalWriting#SoftwareDocumentation#SoftwareDevelopment: "Soon after publishing Tips for hiring your first technical writer, some readers kindly suggested to follow up with a post covering the previous step in the tech writing journey, that is, the realization that one needs a technical writer. As there seems to be a strong appetite for this kind of content, I’m going to spend some words to list what I think are the most egregious signs that your team, company, or product requires a technical writer (or a tech writing team).
If you’re here reading this, you might belong to one of two groups: Either you believe that you need technical writers and arguments to defend the need for them in your team or you don’t know what I’m talking about and you’ve been sent to this blog by someone who does care about documentation. Whatever your group, you should be able to recognize the following signs in your workplace or project. If you do, it might be time to consider opening your mind to the possibility of hiring a tech writer.
First though, let me open with a simple premise: If you’re shipping a product and that product is more difficult to use than a kazoo, you need the product to communicate to users through UX writing, docs, or both, and create a team in charge of executing the underlying content strategy. If nobody in there is heeding to the docs hierarchy of needs, that might be due to a lack of docs culture, ruthless focus on other aspects of product development, lack of funding, etc. It’s completely normal, and also sad.
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