Technical writing

I’ve been fortunate enough to call myself a full-time technical writer (also known as a documentation specialist) for three fantastic SaaS companies.

Technical documentation specialist at Income Access, a Paysafe company

From January 1st to April 1st, I was part of the Income Access technical writing team. This small team consisted of two other technical writers—one specialized in business processes, the other focused on end-user documentation. The technical writing team was nested in the larger department of Knowledge and Process.

Among other things, my primary responsibilities included:

The migration of their current help center from WordPress to Document360. This included completely reformatting their documents from PDF to Markdown, the creation of an internal company-wide style guide, and helping to design the information architecture of the new space.
Creation of developer documentation. This involved full participant at all levels of the Agile development cycle as an active member of three of the five dev teams.
Audit, edit, and iterate on the current internal documentation for the Account Management, Level 1 Support, and Level 2 Support teams. The primary focus was to ensure clarity and correctness as the products were developed. Specifically, I focused on the documentation for BTAGs, tracking, and server-to-server relay.

Technical writer at ShareGate, a Workleap company (formerly GSoft)

After completing the goals I had set for myself at Income Access, I found a position as technical writer and content creator at ShareGate. ShareGate is a third-party Microsoft tool that makes managing complex Microsoft 365 environments easy.

My main responsibilities included:

Full ownership over the content creation and maintenance of the ShareGate end-user help documentation. You can view the content here, at ShareGate Teams management docs.

The Get Started documentation was a particular project that I enjoyed creating from start to end.

Creation and maintenance of the ShareGate Home documentation. This project involved work with the Marketing, Brand, and Design teams to align on story and function.
Design and maintenance of the layout, formatting, and presentation of the help centers. This includes the information structure, categorization, and hierarchy, as well as the HTML/CSS presentation of Zendesk.

Check out my other portfolio pieces on web design for more information.

Edit and develop existing content for the ShareGate migration tool help center, through work with subject matter experts.

I’m particularly proud of the PowerShell series that I reformatted, as well as the Copy teams article series I authored.

Provide support for the technical writer at Officevibe. Since we shared a parent company, it was great to be able to help create new content (in English and in French!), design information architecture and help layout, and mentor the lead Officevibe writer in the ways to optimize Zendesk through HTML.

Customer Success Operations Manager

Once I felt that I had reached my ceiling with the technical documentation at GSoft, I moved into the role of Customer Success Operations Manager. The Techncial Writing team is positioned as a part of Customer Success, so the transition was smooth. Now I was able to support the CS Managers, the Onboarding teams, and the Support teams—for both products, ShareGate and Officevibe.

In my short tenure, I developed many new processes, and documented a lot of what could be called “tribal knowledge.” I helped to develop workflows, reduce blockers for the teams, and create deliverables for the C-suite based on the data in Hubspot and Gainsight.

Technical communications lead at DataKitchen

(As of January 2024, DataKitchen Inc. has moved into a maintenance product phase, having let go of all but a few of its staff.)

I started with DataKitchen in October 2022, having taken over the Technical Communications department when the previous lead retired.

Taking over an entire department was a challenge for two reasons. One, that the previous lead wasn’t around to ask questions—why things were organized the way they were, where assets and deliverables were stored, who contributed to what and how. And two, that it’s a solo department. At DataKitchen, the Technical Communications “team” was under the Product team and consisted of, well, me!

As lead, I was responsible for:

OKRs, roadmap, positioning, and direction of the department.
Analytics and outcomes.
SEO optimization and best practices.
Accessibility considerations for the help content.

And as a content creator, I was in charge of:

The actual technical writing. End-user documentation for three separate and distinct SaaS products: DataOps Observability, DataOps TestGen, and DataOps Automation.
The end-user documentation for the on-prem version of DataOps Automation.
Auditing the previous content for correctness and updating per style guide standards.
Information architecture, CSS and styling, positioning and brand, and user access for the help center.

You can view the help content at docs.datakitchen.io.

Given the small size of the company, I also had daily requests that included: