How I Turned a Technical Writing Team Upside Down...Or, Downside Up?

Every time I think about what happened to me that one beautiful day, I still get goosebumps because that was my whole career shift.

I’m sure a lot of people, if not everyone, at some point realize that they’re not so proud of certain projects from their past. At the same time, they always manage to gain some experience and utilize it somewhere else.

I eventually found myself one of those people. I caught myself toggling between the two roles for six solid years: content production vs technical writing. The more I worked in the marketing niche, the more pressure I was under à la hey you, bring me millions of views with zero investment in ads whatsoever. And I said to myself I want to become one of the best technical writers out there and I need to give it a try. So I did.

I started applying to multiple companies a day, having job interviews one after another, and suddenly, this one project accepted me.

Here I am, on my first day there, getting to know people, and here’s the kicker: the technical writing team that I was introduced to, consisting of six people, was having big issues with documentation.

The team lead couldn’t handle such a number of people in their team; the customer support and account managers were mad and loaded with client requests because of the low-quality documentation; the top management didn’t know what to do nor did they have much time for it. The problems kept being postponed and nobody knew how to help.

I immediately knew this was my time to shine. I took over some of the writers' tasks; soon, Product Owners would invite me to be a technical writer for their team; the TL kept giving me more and more responsibilities to cover; I started communicating with the top management more frequently. Six months later, I got offered a promotion. Of course I said YES! That was that one beautiful day I started with.

Right after, the moment of truth arrived: I was asked if I wanted to keep the current team or to build it from scratch. Obviously, the latter had its own risks and consequences such as me alone doing the work, previously barely managed by six people. Nevertheless, I went for it and built the team of my dreams within six months. That is a lot of months, let me tell you.

However, I stepped into my new role way earlier than I hired new tech writers. As soon as I got offered the new position, oh, did the work begin!

• Hired two specialists instead of six and successfully onboarded both: product and flow introduction, team introduction, and smooth entrance into each of their responsibility scopes.
• Increased the quality of the documentation by making the writers read the task descriptions carefully and communicate with QAs.
• Automated routine tasks with AI to free my time for proofreading and solving other strategic issues.
• Taught my team various AI tools for multiple purposes.
• Recovered communication with account managers and customer support as the connection got completely lost thanks to the former TL’s incompetence.
• Updated all API docs.
• Updated the previously written regulations, standards, and SDLC for my team; some time later, created my own standards from scratch.
• Updated registers, then delegated the task to the tech writers.
• Freed myself from inefficient activities created by the former TL.
• Established team communication and rituals.
• Migrated documentation and tasks to Atlassian, and built a full-fledged information architecture in Confluence.
• Kept collecting feedback from customer support, account managers, and stakeholders.

That is only half of what I did. My point is that this very experience will always be something I'll be loudly proud of. I intuitively knew what my team and the company needed firsthand; thus, I turned the technical writing team’s reputation downside back up.