The Not-Boring Tech Writer

In this solo episode, Kate shares an update on her content update progress. She also reflects on Marcia Riefer Johnston’s interview (S3:E8) and on the idea of docs stewardship as opposed to docs ownership.

I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that were rolled out in December. I updated an additional 91 articles since my last episode, taking my total to 457. 🎉 I also reorganized another three Features subcategories, taking me to the milestone of having updated half those categories using content type-inspired information architecture. I also relocated 12 mice from my basement.

Marcia’s episode prompted a lot of reflection for me. Her infectious, unbridled enthusiasm for this work—from learning new tools to new domains— reminded me of all the reasons I love the craft of technical writing, and how thankful I am that for the last year I’ve largely “only” been doing technical writing. I also appreciated Marcia’s exhortations to share what you know because you never know what great things will come from sharing your knowledge. Too often, we don’t share what we know because we don’t think we know “enough” (whatever that is). But sharing knowledge is a gift to others.

Thanks to a conversation with a friend, I’ve started to come around to the idea of docs stewardship rather than docs ownership. “Stewardship” comes from the Old English words for house and guard. Stewards originally managed estates for medieval lords. I extend this into the world of documentation (doesn’t “Guardian of the Docs” sound like an awesome way to describe what we do? Maybe a swag idea, too, non?). Most modern definitions of stewardship include the idea of “careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care” (source), though they may also add sustainability, ethical use, or “a duty to protect and maintain assets which might be natural, financial, or informational” (source). Marcia’s observation that a lot of a tech writer’s job involves project and process management aligns with this approach, I believe. I explore some other ways I like this docs stewardship model and then draw a comparison between tech writers and gardeners.

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Kate Mueller: [00:00:05] 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.

Kate Mueller: [00:00:21] Hello, lovely not-boring tech writers. I'm Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I'm thinking about or working on. I'm recording this episode at the beginning of April, right after Trump announced many new tariffs and before the NCAA March Madness championship. First, my progress update. Since my last episode, I've updated 91 more articles, taking my grand total to 457. I've also reorganized another three feature subcategories. This was a big milestone, since it means I've now reorganized half of the feature subcategories using these content type perspectives. I still have a long way to go on my article updates, but the content hierarchy changes feel like they're adding a lot of clarity. Although I kind of regret combining all of this into one project in terms of velocity, it's also meant that I'm updating the content itself and the way it's organized all at the same time, so each feature subcategory feels fairly done by the time I've made those changes. Well, as much as any documentation is ever done. Also, if you wanted a mouse infestation update, I relocated a total of 12 mice. 12 as in a whole dozen. I was astonished, maybe a little mortified. Since then, I've implemented my preventive measures. Knock on wood, I haven't heard any scratching in the walls since.

Kate Mueller: [00:01:55] I hope you enjoyed the episode with Marcia as much as I did. I've been reflecting on a lot of things since that interview. The first is that right now, for the first time in my career, I'm mostly only being a tech writer. I'm sure that sounds odd to some of you, but I entered the tech writing world sideways through support and product. Tech writing has been a part of my roles for a long time, but it's rarely been in my job title. I've usually done support or training or software testing or product management alongside writing documentation. Most often, tech writing wasn't something I could dedicate consistent hours to. I had to sneak it in around other responsibilities, or when releases or support tickets seem to demand that a doc be written or updated. But for the last year or so, it really has been the majority of my primary role. And there's something really awesome about getting to fully embrace that role and own it, while also doing this podcast and getting to talk shop with so many amazing writers. So thank you, dear listener, for being here and listening. You help make this possible.

Kate Mueller: [00:03:11] One of my key takeaways from the episode with Marcia was how excited she still is to be in this field, even after 40 years. Her enthusiasm for learning new tools and domains and for continuing to hone her writing craft was infectious. It kind of inspired me. I feel like I'd fallen a little bit into the weeds of working on documentation, and chatting with her helped drag me back up to the bigger picture of what I'm actually doing when I work on my docs. I'm using writing skills I've developed for most of my life; I'm constantly learning and being challenged; I'm sharing knowledge I have for the benefit of others; and I'm making other people's lives just a little bit better in the process. I've met a lot of tech writers who are hesitant to share their knowledge. Not because of knowledge hoarding or greed or even arrogance, but because they feel like they don't know enough to be considered truly knowledgeable or experts. I don't know enough about this thing, so therefore I shouldn't, or I can't, share what I know about it because I'm just not an expert. Marcia did such a great job of sidestepping that narrative, and I really loved her message that you never know what great things will come of sharing what you know. That whole narrative about how 'I'm not expert enough to share my knowledge', that's really driven by us forgetting what a gift knowledge sharing is. You don't have to be an expert to give your knowledge to others. In fact, sometimes it's way easier to gift it when you don't think you're an expert. Like Marcia, you're sharing a pattern or a detail that you've discovered that has made your life better. You're not pretending to tell somebody this is the only way that they can do something. All you're doing is showing them one way that's worked for you, and maybe that'll work for them, and maybe it won't, but you're still giving them something. It's operating from a place of sharing and abundance and I think that's always a good thing. At the end of the day, this is one of the reasons I love our community so much. There are a lot of smart people here, but a lot of us don't need to prove that we're the smartest person in the room. We just like sharing what we know and learning from others, and that makes for a fantastic reciprocal relationship. All I can say about that is that I hope that in another 20 years, I will still be just as enthusiastic about doing this work as Marcia is.

Kate Mueller: [00:05:59] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, your team's next knowledge base solution. You don't have to be a technical wizard to use KnowledgeOwl. Our intuitive, robust features empower teammates of all feathers to spend more time on content and less time on administration. Learn more and sign up for a free 30-day trial at knowledgeowl.com.

Kate Mueller: [00:06:20] And we're back! I recently had a conversation with a friend who was updating their writing portfolio. They'd gone back to some documentation that they'd written a year or two ago to see if they should use the link to the live documentation or their own saved copy for their writing portfolio. What they discovered when they checked the live docs was that the current writer working on the documentation had made a lot of changes that my friend really didn't want their name tied to, to say the least. Very different style choices, and the content was really different. That wouldn't have been a showcase of my friend's work anymore, it would have been a showcase of the new writer's work. They pulled the copy that they had saved and used that. In the midst of this, my friend and I chatted a bit about what it feels like to own something for a while, and then to relinquish ownership of it to somebody else, and how that can make you feel sometimes a bit sad to see it evolve in ways that don't feel aligned with the work that you did, or what you tried to build, or just the way that you approached the problem. While we were having this conversation, while I was trying to make my friend feel better, among other things, I found myself saying something that I didn't realize I felt until it popped out, which is this:

Kate Mueller: [00:07:51] I'm not sure that any of us truly owns documentation. We could probably get into a whole thing about what ownership of writing and intellectual property is, but that's not really what I want to talk about in this episode. What I found myself encouraging my friend to consider was that their time working on that documentation wasn't a period of ownership, but was a period of docs stewardship. We mind the docs for a period of time, we try to do our best to serve the product, the team, the customer, or whomever the docs are for, and then eventually someone else must take up that mantle of stewardship. I said this in an off the cuff “do I really believe this” kind of way, it just sort of popped out. But in the weeks since we had this conversation, I've sat with the idea a lot more, and honestly, I'm really warming to it. Because it's me, I started to go down a rabbit hole on the concept of stewardship because I wasn't sure if it actually worked well enough to do a podcast episode about it. The bulk of my experience with the term “stewardship” is as a form of leadership, which is really interesting, but doesn't at all fit with what I was saying in this context. Instead, I found myself leaning toward the way that land stewards act to conserve and celebrate the land that they work with. To sustain it and make sure that it's there for future generations.

Kate Mueller: [00:09:34] The word “steward” comes from the Old English words for house and guard. It draws heavily from large estates where stewards managed the estate and all that included for medieval lords. A steward was literally the guardian of the home. I have to admit, Guardian of the Docs has a really nice ring to it. Don't you want to tell people that's what you do? "I am the Guardian of the Docs." Honestly, I might have to add this to the list of podcast swag ideas. So that's where the term comes from. Nowadays, it's evolved to include a lot of other things that have nothing to do with lords and estates. Merriam-Webster lists one definition of stewardship as “the conducting, supervising or managing of something, especially the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care.” Other sources extend this definition to include a focus on ensuring sustainability or ethical use. One of my favorites included “a duty to protect and maintain assets which might be natural, financial, or informational.” Totally loving the inclusion of ‘informational” there. But there's a lot here around careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care. And sitting with this idea has taken me back to something Marcia said in our last episode:

Kate Mueller: [00:11:10] Her observation that a lot of a tech writer's job isn't actually writing, but more like project management. Managing conversations, getting the right people in the room, prioritizing the right work, all that fun stuff. If you define tech writing to include all of that work that goes on around the writing that contributes to it, that feeds back into it, that facilitates it, there's definitely an ethos of stewardship. We are trying to carefully and responsibly manage the documentation that is entrusted to our care. We're trying to make sure it's accurate, we're trying to format and style it in ways that make sense to our readers, or in some cases, are required by law. We're trying to make sure we incorporate the expertise of the right subject matter experts. We're generally trying to do this in sustainable and maintainable ways. And honestly, as I've thought about it, tech writers are some of the people who project so much care into the work that they do. A lot of thoughtfulness, a lot of empathy, a lot of thinking about the end user experience. We do our best to manage all this stuff properly, and we also don't typically lose sight of the fact that other writers will come in to work on our docs, and eventually we won't be the one caring for them anymore, someone else will step in as the next steward. And while the choices that the new steward might make may not have been the choices that we would make, what matters is that we were good docs stewards while we were there.

Kate Mueller: [00:12:56] We laid the groundwork for the next steward to continue that work and make the choices as they see fit to make. We created something that was useful and sustainable, and we kept it alive and growing for that time period so that there was something to pass on to the next person. Sometimes we get to help groom the next generation of stewards, sometimes we don't. Also, the concept doesn't fully work. We're not pure stewards, we're also creating many of the assets that we're stewarding. Or as Marcia worded it so beautifully, we're still practicing a craft to produce documentation. This isn't a perfect stewardship, we're also maybe owning or maybe creating, or whatever you want to pair, along with the stewarding. We're not just conserving, we're also building upon. I like the idea of giving voice to both concepts, to not just have it be about ownership, but to also be about stewardship. Maybe in this sense, tech writers are a bit like gardeners. We gather the seeds of knowledge, we try to plant and nourish and water those so that they can grow into full, useful knowledge. And when they're not useful anymore, we rip them out and we begin that process again. Does a gardener own a garden? I'm pretty sure that most wouldn't use that word. I garden, and I wouldn't say I own my garden, but we definitely steward it. So maybe think about your docs like a garden. I don't know, maybe that works for you, maybe it doesn't. But for the next month, I'm focusing on trying to reframe how I think about our docs from being “my docs” or something that I “own,” to being the docs that are entrusted to my care and management, and to try to make good choices for their sustainability. I hope that idea resonates with you too. Happy stewarding!

Kate Mueller: [00:15:05] If you have ideas for topics or guests, if there's a bit of the tech writing world that your life would be improved by hearing an episode on, please message us on LinkedIn or Bluesky at @thenotboringtechwriter, or email tnbtw@knowledgeowl.com. 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. Chad Timblin is our podcast head of operations. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. You can check out KnowledgeOwl's products at knowledgeowl.com, and if you want to work with me on docs, on knowledge management coaching, on revamping an existing knowledge base, go to knowledgewithsass.com. Until next time, I'm Kate Mueller and you are the not-boring tech writer.