Presentation on lessons learned at Salesforce while growing a Documentation team from 3 to 200+ content creators. Delivered at Write The Docs San Francisco.

1. Mistakes to Avoid When You Grow Your Doc Team
Gavin Austin
Principal Technical Writer
gaustin@salesforce.com
@GavinAustinSays
Write The Docs San Francisco

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3. “What was great is that we we made the most of our mistakes because we
got in the habit of viewing them as opportunities to learn and improve.”
Ray Dalio

4. Agenda
• People & Teams
• Tools & Content
• Internal & External Marketing

5. 1. People & Teams

6. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Peter Drucker

7. Identify your team’s personality and hire accordingly.

8. Create training to save time, money, and to strengthen your culture.

9. Welcome transparency to foster trust and creativity.

10. Define a clear career path to motivate everyone.

11. Each time you double in size, reevaluate your processes.

12. Train managers because management has little to do with writing.

13. Participate with all doc and dev teams or say goodbye.

14. Get feedback and answers before you begin humongous projects.

15. Clearly define specialist roles and give them resources to succeed.

16. Standardize things like promotions and specialist roles across teams.

17. 2. Tools & Content

18. “So, before you begin the writing, be sure you know the purpose or mission
or objective of every piece of content that you write... And why should
your audience care?”
Ann Handley

19. Minimize your content to scale it.

20. Bridge gaps with UX to find and add value.

21. Hire more people who are not tech writers.

22. Measure what you have to get what you need.*

23. Integrate into the development process or lose out.

24. Invest early in dev docs and have devs work on them too.

25. Make improvements highly visible and explain why they were made.

26. Coordinate with teams who consume your content and leverage their content
too.

27. When researching tools, think of scale, standards, and localization.

28. Before investing in tools, ask other companies which tools they use.

29. Align all teams with a shared taxonomy, metadata, and style guide.

30. Imagine the future of your content from your customer’s perspective.

31. Help your customers solve a business problem; don’t just document the UI.

32. 3. Internal & External Marketing

33. “Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.”
Seth Godin

34. Be exciting or at least don’t bore people.

35. Take more risks to get more rewards.

36. Clarify your business value and highlight it.

37. Share your metrics often and correlate them with cost savings.

38. Collect and share customer success stories based on your docs.

39. Hang out with customers and executives to wow and serve them.

40. Thank you!