Lessons from industry experts

Volunteers from the TWIN community interviewed experts/leaders from departments other than Technical Publications to understand the expectation of those department leads from Tech Pubs.

Lessons from AI experts (a video series)

For this lesson, we spoke to the following leaders:

Shruti Harish, Senior Director of Azure Data & AI in the Customer Success team (US Midwest region) at Microsoft
Ellis Pratt, Co-owner of Cherryleaf, a Tech Writing Services company in UK
Samartha Vashistha, Senior Content Design Manager at Meta, UK
Marina Orešković, Senior Product Manager at Across Systems GmbH

In this lesson, the AI leaders answered some of these questions:

Have you witnessed success with any AI experiment for your team? Would you like to share that experience?
Have you seen productivity gains with the use of AI?
How can we ensure that our AI systems are ethical, fair, transparent, and accountable?
How will generative AI affect our industry in the short and longer term?
Which content types are easy to generate/augment using AI?
Are you expanding what you cover in documentation because AI has made your efforts more efficient? Or, are you providing the same coverage but with less effort?
Does the base functionality of Large Language Models (LLMs) provide what you need to generate docs, or do you need to provide customized logic and input to ensure good results?
How does the structure of your content improve or hinder the use of LLMs?
How has the use of LLMs impacted the presentation layer for your content?

For this lesson, we invited a special guest, David Nelson-Gal (a.k.a. DNG), who is the Founder and Chief Product Officer at Viakoo, which delivers performance, security and compliance management for Enterprise IoT Applications and Devices.

In this lesson, DNG answered the following questions:

How does technical content play a role in engaging users and keeping them loyal to a brand?
Which content helps you scale the business?
Which are the most critical communication deliverables for decision makers?
What are the characteristics of a successful and well-run tech pubs team?

For this lesson, we invited Torrey Podmajersky, who works at Google as UX writer. She is a true UX writing pioneer. She has written inclusive and accessible experiences for OfferUp, Xbox, Microsoft account, Windows apps, privacy, and Microsoft education, and now Google. She is the author of Strategic Writing for UX, which includes insights she has gleaned over 10 years of UX writing practice.

In this lesson, Torrey answered the following questions:

How does “strategic UX writing” make business impact?
Does the conversational writing style work for all apps? Which apps benefit the most from this writing style?
What are the challenges with translating the content into various languages if it’s written in a conversational style? Does it increase the localization cost?
How to achieve consistency with the conversational writing style across the technical writing department?
What is covered in the book Strategic UX Writing? Who is it targeted at? What are the key takeaways?

For this lesson, we invited an industry veteran Marco Marino, Vice President of Worldwide Business Engagement at Globalization Partners International (GPI), a leading global provider of enterprise-level translation solutions and localization services.

In this lesson, Marco answered the following questions:

Which are the top three languages into which English technical documentation is translated?
Which are the new emerging markets (read languages) that businesses are focusing on?
What best practices can technical publications managers follow to ensure that their content can be translated at the most cost-effective rate AND with the highest quality?
Are there tools that can help you save cost by offering AI-based high-quality machine translation?
What are the trends/best practices w.r.t. to localization of videos and voice-based apps?

We've put together a unique lesson for you. It's on a technology that's catching everyone's fancy and challenging the current currency and how it should be exchanged. Yes, we are talking about cryptocurrency, which is based on the Blockchain technology.

For this lesson, we interviewed (through email) Mary Boyd, who shared some great insights on the Blockchain technology documentation. Before we dive into the lesson details, here's "something about Mary" :-)

Mary Boyd is a technical writer and manager with a background in software development. She is based in NYC and most recently worked in the cryptocurrency industry. She is passionate about information architecture, content strategy, user engagement and retention, and the sharing of ideas.

In this lesson, Mary answered the following questions:

What’s blockchain? Which industries does it impact? How?
If technical writers have to contribute to apps based on the blockchain technology, do they need any prerequisite knowledge?
What are the typical deliverables for apps based on this technology? API guides, config guides, user guides, or all of these?
Considering that the blockchain-based currency (for example, bitcoin) hasn’t gain official acceptance at a large scale, do you think companies working in this domain can offer a stable career?
Any other tips for technical writers and documentation managers?

You can find her answers here.

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