In this episode of The Knowledgebase Ninjas Podcast, Gowri Ramkumar is joined by Kathyana Rule, Senior Technical Writer at Celigo. They discuss Kathyana’s journey from biochemistry to technical writing, how to analyse document growth and productivity, and tips on generating organic traffic to your document.
Key Facts
- Kathyana’s Linkedin
- Celigo website
- Kathyana holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative and Professional Writing from Purdue University
- Kathyana has been associated with technical writing for nearly five years
- Celigo helps companies automate processes, synchronise data, and streamline automation integration through its iPaaS cloud applications
Key Takeaways
- Kathyana started her content creation journey during her biochemistry university studies. She found technical writing to be fascinating amidst the content creation world
- After graduating, she immediately started looking for jobs and opportunities in technical writing as she knew that she wanted to pursue it as a full-time career
- For Kathyana, “mastering technical writing is not limited to learning to write, but you must understand the document management and life cycle completely”
- Kathyana believes that the documentation requirement at Celigo is intriguing, where apart from the instructions guides, they get to choose different topics for documentation based on customer feedback. The documentation process flow at Celigo is as follows:
- Step 1: Based on the product or customer feedback, the documentation requirement is identified
- Step 2: Once the demand is identified, the documentation team reaches out to the product developers’ team to gather more information about the relevant topic
- Step 3: Based on the developers’ feedback, the documentation team conducts their own research on the product features
- Step 4: Once their research is done, the document is shared with the developers, product managers, and colleagues for review and feedback
- Step 5: The document is updated based on the feedback provided by the team
- Step 6: The document gets published
- Kathyana wishes to have learned to work along with new people earlier in life
- Kathyana shares the challenges she faced working with new writers and having the whole team work together. On the contrary, she admires the diversity of her technical writing team and believes that different minds bring different and innovative ideas to the table
- The technical writing team at Celigo consists of nine technical writers as of April 2022. However, they are aiming to expand their team of writers this year
- Kathyana accredits her promotion to Senior Technical Writer to her team, who encouraged her throughout the process and made her realise her true potential
- Celigo analyses documentation growth and productivity through views (on-site) and customer feedback
- All of Celigo’s documentation is open for public access Celigo employs on-page SEO and Google Analytics to generate more organic traffic and maximise productivity
Key Resources
- The Edge Podcast
- iPaaS cloud applications from Celigo
What documentation-related advice would Kathyana give to her 20-year-old self?
Be humble, take feedback, and learn from other writers, developers, and product managers as much as you can.
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