Writing @ Wildbit

This is a simple internal slide deck designed to help the team see the bigger picture of why writing is important to our customers, help them overcome concerns about writing, and clarify the process to remove doubts..

Transcript

1. Writing @
2. Help people create and ship better software.
3. Help people create and ship better software. Teams and Individuals
4. Help people create and ship better software. Generate code faster and with less effort.
5. Help people create and ship better software. Deliver code to customers faster and with less effort.
6. Help people create and ship better software. By removing the tedious parts and letting them focus on what matters…
7. Help people create and ship better software. …and also by teaching.
8. Why write, share, and teach? ✎
9. Tools are great.
10. But having a tool isn’t enough.
11. Here’s a tool…
12. 1. Freshen smelly shoes. 2. Remove static from clothing, hair, TVs, etc. 3. Clean pet hair from the floor or furniture. Now add some knowledge/ideas…
13. Here’s another tool…
14. 1. Pipe frosting. Cut off a corner to use as a pastry bag. 2. Store homemade soup. Freeze in a closed bag and pile them up for space saving storage. 3. Inflate to protect precious cargo. Now add some knowledge/ideas…
15. Wildbit is great at support, but support and manuals are safety nets.
16. “If you want them to RTFM, make a better FM.” - Kathy Sierra
17. What if the “manual” was full of ideas and knowledge?
18. tt The Tools Safety Net Customer Success Customer Support Documentation Guides Newsletters Labs We’re great at support and docs, but these are reactive approaches to helping customers. We’re great at this. Without tools, nothing else matters. Blogs & Social Media Communication We’re pretty good at this, but there’s some room for improvement in increasing our reach and consistency. We’re off to a good start, but outside of our tools, these are the kinds of efforts that can really help our customers take their game to the next level. Since these are usually side projects, they’re often difficult to create and support. However, it’s important that we keep an eye out for these kinds of opportunities and begin to treat them as central to our process.
19. “I don’t have anything interesting to say.” You may not realize it, but you have a lot of interesting things to say and share. No matter what your role is, there are countless other people around the world doing the same stuff but with less experience and knowledge. Even the smallest idea/tip could be really useful and interesting to someone else.
20. “I’m not a good writer.” There’s only one way to get better. But until then, don’t worry about it. You’re surrounded by a whole team of people who can help. Get your thoughts out in words, and we’ll all do the rest.
21. “I don’t know what to write about.” Talk to the team. It’s sometimes difficult to recognize the really cool knowledge that you have because you already know it. Somebody on the team can help you see the ideas and topics that may not be obvious to you but would be very interesting to others.
22. Process
23. Idea ✒ Write Refine ⚑ Edit Produce Promote Illustrate Publish Review ⏲ Schedule Editorial Calendar & Workflow Paper Illustrating or creating visualizations of any kind for posts is a fluid process depending on whether they’re decorative or based on sketches or graphs generated by the author. The general rule is that the sooner we start on them, the better.
24. Idea ✒ Write Refine ⚑ Edit Illustrate Paper We keep a list of ideas in Trello. This way, we can all discuss and prioritize topics collectively. Ever need an idea for something to write about it? Voila. The idea list. Use any tool or format you’re comfortable writing in, but so far Paper has worked pretty well for collaboration, so it’s not too bad as a writing tool as well. Early on, any topic needs refinement. This is less about editing and more about getting the structure and key points nailed down early so that editing is just about semantics. The less refinement we do after this, the smoother the process goes. For example, if you’re writing about a technical topic, you’ll want to have a team member with knowledge of the topic check for technical accuracy and provide relevant technical feedback. Once we’re at editing, hopefully it’s just typos and phrasing. Editing should still be managed through paper because editing in Craft is more difficult, and the process of moving content back and forth is error-prone.
25. Illustrate Production is primarily about migrating the content from Paper, or wherever, into Craft. This is where we’ll mix in pull quotes, add images and captions, and get the layout right. Ideally, there’s no more editing needed at this point. Sometimes, things will get out of whack going from the written medium into Craft. Fixing typos and markup can break things, and it’s important to have a final review to make sure all of the links work, the images have good captions, and everything else is perfect. With more and more articles to publish and a goal of making sure that all of the sites are current with the latest news, we’ll need to coordinate and schedule different posts to be published at different times for the best exposure and to not overwhelm the publishing process. Publishing is the easy part, but it’s just the beginning. Produce Promote Publish Review ⏲ Schedule Promoting is where the real work comes in. Depending on the content, we’ll promote it via Twitter, republishing on Medium, our product guides and blogs, or email newsletters.