Upcoming Webinar on 19 February: Planning User Documentation When You Are a Startup Business

Once again we've invited the presenters of our webinars to provide a guest post talking about their upcoming presentation. We hope this will provide even more information to potential attendees and give a glimpse into what you can expect to learn. Today’s guest post is by Ellis Pratt, who presents the webinar Planning User Documentation When You Are a Startup Business on Tuesday, 19 February, from 10:00-11:00 AM EST (GMT-5).

Developing user documentation for a technology startup company can be an interesting and challenging role. The objective for startups can be very simple: to discover how to become a profitable business before the seed money runs out! This can result in technical communicators working in an environment where it can be uncertain what the product can do, who the audience is, and how much budget is available. While this can make life difficult for a technical communicator, it also provides them with an opportunity to start from a “clean sheet” and feel they are not being held back by having to deal with legacy documentation.

Books such as The Lean Startup provide useful advice on building a successful startup business, but they do not cover explicitly how to provide user documentation. So can we take the principles from these books and apply them to the development of user documentation? Are there other places we can look for advice and guidance?

In my webinar for STC, “Planning User Documentation When You Are a Startup Business,” we’ll look at these issues and explore some of the approaches available to you when youʼre working in this environment. Weʼll help you understand the position of user documentation within a startup, prioritise work, in a way that will be understandable to both those new to and experienced in technical communication.