The Not-Boring Tech Writer

Meet our new host Kate Mueller and get the inside scoop on how The Not-Boring Tech Writer (TNBTW) will work moving forward.

Kate Mueller is the Documentation Goddess of KnowledgeOwl, a seasoned technical writer and owner of knowledgewithsass, a knowledge management coaching service. She’s written and maintained documentation for companies in broadcasting, financial services, IT, and software for 15+ years. She’ll be hosting TNBTW moving forward.

In this episode, Kate discusses her vision for TNBTW: a podcast dedicated to everyone who is writing technical documentation, including those who may not feel comfortable calling themselves tech writers. Whether you create product documentation, support documentation, READMEs, or any other technical content—and whether you deal with imposter syndrome, lack formal training, or find yourself somewhere in the gray area between technical communications and general writing—the TNBTW reboot might be your new favorite podcast. Kate talks about her own imposter syndrome using the tech writer label and recounts her tech writer villain origin story.

We plan to release two episodes per month: one episode will maintain the traditional TNBTW format of interviewing a guest and focusing on useful skills or tools that can help you improve your tech writing skills; the other episode will be a behind-the-scenes look into what Kate’s working on, struggling with, or thinking about in her daily tech writing life.

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We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback:

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Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills, and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community.
In today's episode, we relaunch the podcast and introduce you to our new (and hopefully not-boring) host. Spoiler, I'm neither Jacob nor Jared. My name is Kate Mueller. Hi, nice to meet you. When KnowledgeOwl decided to relaunch The Not-Boring Tech Writer, they asked me to serve as the host and my first thought was immediate panic. Am I a real enough tech writer to host this show? I feel more like a 'Pinocchio' tech writer. What if everybody figures it out? I'm not formally trained in technical communication or technical writing, and I do have formal training in both writing, generally at an information management, but I've never been super confident or comfortable with the title of tech writer. I've been doing technical writing for at least the last 15 years. I started with documenting databases I designed and built for coworkers to give them instructions on how to use them. Then I moved into user guides for third party software my company used, and eventually ended up writing support documentation for the software companies I worked for. I've helped write app copy and microcopy in two software products. I've written release notes and product newsletters and 'Getting Started' guides, and I've taken thousands of screenshots. Working at KnowledgeOwl, I've brainstormed and advised customers on all kinds of things, including information architecture, content best practices, authoring and auditing processes, and getting buy-in and managing new knowledge base rollouts. I've created the first formal knowledge based places. I've migrated from one knowledge platform to another. I've trained people, I've mentored younger writers. I've spent the last 15 years taking complicated, highly technical tools and breaking them into easier to understand components. I've written documentation for technical and non-technical users and I've had to find ways to explain and simplify things that, 48 hours before, I'd never even heard of.

Kate Mueller: [00:02:26] These are all valuable technical writing skills, but I still kind of felt like an imposter offering to host a podcast about tech writing. I can't really say why I didn't feel technical enough to host this podcast. I guess, I don't write code, so there's that. I've never created a DOCSIS code pipeline from scratch. I'm not very good with using automating tools or anything that involves code, especially conditionals and loops, and I haven't been formally trained on it. I didn't go get a certificate or anything in technical communications. I just feel like I'm always aware of how much I don't know and all the deep expertise I don't have. I'm not a wizard with analytics, I've updated API docs, but I've never created them from scratch. I feel like I have a pretty good depth of knowledge, but a lot of my knowledge has grown only when I had some kind of immediate, urgent problem to solve, rather than in a methodical, systematic, or formal way.

Kate Mueller: [00:03:34] But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a lot of the writers I know feel this way. There's this slightly nagging feeling all the time, because I'm not an expert at literally the entire domain, I'm somehow not a real tech writer, and everybody else is. I've shied away from using the phrase 'tech writer' to describe what I do. Sometimes I've called it support documentation or product documentation. Sometimes I call myself a documentarian. I've also called myself a product champion. When I dug into other podcasts on tech writing, it felt like there were good podcasts for technical communication and good podcasts for general writing tips, but it didn't feel like there was anything fitting what I needed. Where's the podcast for those of us who don't feel like real tech writers, but who are, nonetheless, writing technical or support or product documentation on a regular basis? You're listening to the answer. That's what The Not-Boring Tech Writer is now, or at least that's what I hope it becomes. My focus in relaunching this podcast is on carving out a space for writers like me. If you feel like you write pretty good docs, but you dread when someone asks you to set up analytics, or you want to roll your eyes when marketing requests, SEO changes, or writing docs is just one of many hats you wear and you're worried you're not good enough at it. Or maybe you're secretly convinced you aren't qualified enough for your role. You found the right place, welcome home. We'll get to feel like mild imposters together. And together, we'll be exploring topics and hearing from guests to help inspire us, make us feel less alone, and teach us more about the skills and areas we don't feel as confident in.

Kate Mueller: [00:05:29] Here's what you can expect from The Not-Boring Tech Writer moving forward. I'm aiming for a two episodes per month schedule. One of those episodes will be, what I'm affectionately calling, the 'Kate Sounds Off' episodes, kind of like this one. You'll get to hear me talk about what's top of mind for me and my tech writing journey, what I'm working on, what I'm anxious about, whatever. My deepest, darkest tech writing secrets. Then the other episodes will stay true to the existing Not-Boring Tech Writer format, where I'll interview guests about the things I, and hopefully you, want to learn more about so we can improve our skill set, confidence and knowledge together. It's my first time hosting a podcast and as we all know, new genres can be hard at first, but I hope you'll stick around and join me on this journey. Regardless of whether you call yourself a tech writer, a content specialist, a support person, a product manager, a customer experience rep, a documentarian, a community manager, or any other role that might somehow include writing documentation, you're one of us. A not-boring tech writer.

Kate Mueller: [00:06:42] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. If you're looking for an 'owl-in-one' solution to keep your software team's docs organized, KnowledgeOwl has you covered. KnowledgeOwl offers content access control for internal and public docs, flexible customization, robust security, and friendly support. Learn more and sign up for a free 30 day trial at knowledgeowl.com.

Kate Mueller: [00:07:09] So now that you have a sense for where The Not-Boring Tech Writer is going, I wanted to give you a taste of what a normal episode will sound like. One of the questions I find interesting is how people got into tech writing, or however you describe the kind of writing you do. Your tech writing villain origin story, as it were. Since I plan to ask this of all my guests, I figured I could start by giving you mine. I had a Master's in English and I was teaching college freshman composition. I know, it was kind of awful. I was burnt out from teaching as an adjunct at multiple universities and making very little money. My then-partner and I moved to a new state, but I didn't get hired by the university there, I think we all could tell that I was burnt out, so I took a temp job at a call center. This sounds like a terrible punchline, but it's true. The call center was a short term center, spun up by a radio broadcasting company to track the rollout and installation of new equipment to all their affiliates nationwide. I worked with about six other people. Our job was to call radio stations to confirm they'd received the new equipment, see if they'd installed it and see if they'd had any problems with it. Some technical support, some contract support, lots and lots of talking to radio station personnel and broadcast engineers. This was pre-google sheets days, and we had to report on daily numbers of which stations had come online and what markets they were in. My manager had a single large Excel spreadsheet that contained the shipping and contact information for every piece of equipment that got sent out, and each of us on the team had a copy of a portion of that spreadsheet so that we wouldn't be calling the same stations as someone else. When we confirmed a station had installed and was using the new equipment, we wrote the station call letters and their market on a sheet of paper taped to the wall outside my manager's office.

Kate Mueller: [00:09:15] At the end of each day, my manager pulled up her master spreadsheet and I grabbed the sheet off the wall. I'd read off the station, and she'd open the spreadsheet for the rep who'd made the call and copy their notes and info into her spreadsheet. We did all of this so we could report numbers to management, and it usually took us at least half an hour at the end of the day. Let's just say, that the process was wildly inefficient and I'm a process person, so solvable inefficiencies tend to irritate me and make my eye twitch. One day, I asked my manager if I could play around with Microsoft Access. It was already on all of our computers and I was like, maybe I could create a database instead. Mind you, I didn't know anything about databases at this point, but my manager was pretty awesome and she gave me her blessing and a week of time to try to figure it out. By the end of the week, we had a workgroup database with synced copies on everyone's machines and a simple form to serve as the front end. It was basically a rudimentary CRM, but free. I wrote my first technical documentation ever. It was a set of instructions in Microsoft Word and how to open the database, pull in the synced changes, open the form we used, read through the notes and figure out if it was time to call the station again. There were also instructions on how to add notes about the call and mark when the station had confirmed successful installation. This took our end of day numbers process from being like a 30 plus minute endeavor to like two minutes at most. I remember thinking, oh my God, this is great. I got to do something with writing that wasn't teaching.

Kate Mueller: [00:11:03] In retrospect, this encapsulates a lot of how I define tech writing now. I had to learn a totally new to me and somewhat complicated thing, and then I wrote explanations and how-to instructions to introduce that thing to people with even less background knowledge than I had so that they could successfully use it. That experience prompted me to go back to school for information management, which led me from databases into software, and I've written technical documentation in some form at every job I've held since. So that's a bit about me. In the coming weeks, you'll probably learn a lot more as I talk to other writers and continue to overshare my own tech writing journey. Thanks for listening today.

Kate Mueller: [00:11:51] The Not-Boring Tech Writer is produced by the lovely humans at Astronomic Audio with editing by Dillon, transcription by Alan, and post-production by Been and Alex. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. If you have feedback or ideas for a topic or guest idea, shoot us an email at tnbtw@knowledgeowl.com or message KnowledgeOwl on LinkedIn. And if you want to work with me on knowledge management coaching, go to knowledgewithsass.com. That's knowledge with s-a-s-s dot com. Until next time, I'm Kate Mueller, and you are the not-boring tech writer.