“Scaling a unicorn: how to mature your documentation program and support a changing business”
Elise Davis;
Talk
If you’re lucky, you work at an organization with enormous growth potential and a clear upward trajectory. But how do you keep excelling at your job, when the company you work for is structurally and strategically different from the one you joined (and it won’t stop changing)?
The company I work for is a marketing automation and data platform that has grown from a small, niche email service provider into a successful public company with a sizable, loyal customer base and a market cap of $11.77 billion dollars (at the time of writing). I’ve been with the company since 2019, with numerous pivots both in business strategy and documentation needs.
In this talk, I’ll share how our documentation team adjusted its strategies alongside a changing business. You’ll learn our approach to adapting to a changing environment and how to create a team whose expertise is valued across the organization and contributes to your company’s success.
Our journey of adapting to a growing, changing company has included:
- Getting rid of an entire category of documentation
- Clearly delimiting the documentation team’s responsibilities as the organization structure changed (e.g., video, strategic content, marketing collateral, developer vs. user docs, and more)
- Developing relationships with influential figures across the org
- Prioritizing retention, so our team is full of experts who can contextualize problems, provide historical context, and dive into tricky issues without unnecessary oversight
- Creating an ownership-based team culture, so every tech writer feels both responsible and empowered to solve problems, try new things, and learn from mistakes.
I’ll share what’s worked, what hasn’t, and the tangible steps we took to evolve from a scrappy, small team at a tech startup to a mature department with the respect of our partners across the organization.