Technical writing is an essential skill for product managers, yet it needs to be more noticed or under-prioritized. Product specs, user manuals, troubleshooting guides, and other technical documentation serve a valuable purpose by spreading knowledge and promoting understanding between teams and customers. Crafting and maintaining useful, well-organized technical content ensures engineers stay aligned on product requirements, support teams can address issues, and most importantly—users have a good experience getting the most from our products.
This post provides an in-depth look at technical writing specifically for product managers. We’ll define what effective technical writing entails, discuss why it matters so much to the Product Manager role, outline must-have skills for writing documentation, cover best practices for creating technical content across common document types, recommend tools to incorporate into your workflow, examine frequent challenges, and provide frameworks upon which to build great technical writing abilities over time through continual practice.
What is Technical Writing?
Technical writing refers to conveying complex technical information to a specific audience clearly, accurately, and organized. The hallmarks of quality technical writing include:
- Purposeful organization: Content structured in logical sections and sequences to orient users. Uses formatting techniques for quick scans.
- Concise and scannable: Written minimally with key terms bolded or highlighted for skimming. Avoids overly elaborate text.
- Simple and precise language: Uses straightforward vocab, defines necessary jargon/acronyms, and steers clear of ambiguity.
- Easy to understand: Concepts explained coherently and comprehensively. Provides context and background info as needed.
- Visual communication: Incorporates labeled diagrams, data tables, screenshots, and other graphics for clarity.
Some common types of technical writing Product Managers produce include:
- Product specifications to convey capabilities and technical requirements
- User manuals to teach people how to properly operate or leverage a product
- API documentation to explain technical integration points for developers
- Troubleshooting guides help users or support agents diagnose and fix issues
- Release notes detailing changes, additions, and fixes in software updates
Overall, technical writing focuses on communicating specific technical information to improve understanding for the intended consuming audience, rather than creativity or entertainment as in other forms of writing.
Technical writers prioritize the reader’s needs first, so the documentation can efficiently enable users to utilize products or technology to fulfill their goals. This requires methodically examining complex concepts and translating them into accessible content.
Why Technical Writing Matters for Product Managers
Strong technical writing skills allow product managers to collaborate effectively across functions and stakeholders. By conveying product capabilities and user scenarios clearly in documentation, Product Managers set up teams for success in building solutions that solve real problems.
On the engineering side, precise technical specs are vital for developing product management teams to scope projects accurately and build the right features. Documenting user workflows helps engineers deeply understand customer needs and validate usability. As products grow more complex with multiple integration points, excellent technical communication becomes critical to align requirements between teams.
For customers and end users, detailed documentation like user manuals, getting-started guides, and troubleshooting content provide vital support. Without this information readily available in help centers and knowledge bases, users get frustrated trying to use products, and customer support tickets spike. Preventing obstacles for customers has a major impact on user experience and brand reputation.
Even non-technical stakeholders like executives and marketing teams often depend on product managers to explain technical concepts simply and clearly enough for business decision-making. For example, detailing the major technical challenges and tradeoffs with adding a feature in a launch brief for leadership. Or providing a customer-friendly overview of a new capability that marketers can promote effectively.
In summary, technical writing is core to the product manager role because it:
- Enables engineering teams to build the right solutions
- Provides self-service support to improve user experience
- Equips customers and partners to be successful with products
- Helps explain technology to non-technical business stakeholders
- Drives continuity in spreading product knowledge across the organization
Ultimately, by skillfully communicating technical information in various contexts, Product Managers can have an outsized influence on product success.
Key Technical Writing Skills for Product Managers
Mastering technical writing requires product managers to expand skills that likely differ from their current strengths geared toward strategy, marketing, or business operations.
Below are 8 core abilities needed:
Audience Analysis
- Determine reader demographic – engineers, executives, customers? Understand background.
- Diagnose the audience’s technical proficiency level in the area you’re documenting
- Outline goals and questions they have approaching content
- Shape the tone and depth accordingly to meet audience needs
Distilling Complexity
- Break down complicated technical systems into coherent pieces
- Explain intricate concepts clearly and simply without losing meaning
- Use analogies and metaphors to relate difficult ideas to more familiar domains
Information Architecture
- Logically organize features and functions in order
- Create useful headers and navigational aids like tables of contents
- Enable reader to find answers quickly in long-form documentation
Writing Concisely
- Economy of words balanced with sufficient detail
- Employ lists, short sentences, and paragraphs for better readability
- Cover complexity piece by piece instead of one huge block
Using Visual Communication:
- Supplement text with labeled diagrams, wireframes, photos, videos
- Visualize complex workflows, data relationships, and system architectures
- Illustrate product UI visually for manual creation
Writing for Scannability
- Utilize formatting techniques fit for skimming like bullet points
- Highlight key terms and insights for fast pattern recognition
- Use descriptive headers, and page layout tactics to ease navigation
Avoiding Jargon and Technical Babel
- Explain acronyms on first use, clarify niche terms
- Simplify language without omitting nuances
- Define terminology with plain meanings over obscure words
Verifying Comprehension
- Test documentation with the audience through walkthroughs
- Iterate content based on feedback questions and confusion areas
Creating Effective Technical Documentation
Product managers author various forms of documentation to communicate product details across teams and customers. Core types include:
Spec Sheets
- Highlights product capabilities, key attributes, and technical requirements
- Allows the engineering team to estimate the level of effort for implementation
- Provides sales/marketing collateral to external stakeholders
User Manuals
- Comprehensive guide for intended audiences on all product functionality
- Task-based walkthroughs for major workflows to utilize a solution
- Frequently accessed for customer self-service troubleshooting
API Documentation
- Enables third-party developer integration with detailed interface reference
- Explains authorization protocols, available endpoints, request/response parameters
- Often paired with reference implementations and sandbox environments
When creating documentation, focus on modular writing allowing readers with different needs to access relevant sections. Techniques include:
- Layered Detail: Overview first, then expand into specifics section-by-section
- Segment by Audience: Tailor detail level based on the reader’s assumed proficiency
- Modular Structure through Tables of Contents: Enables jumping straight into needed sections
- Reusable Content: Extract commonly referenced material into standalone supplementary guides
Present information visually with screenshots, wireframes, and videos. Use consistent text formatting like styles, icons, and color cues for better comprehension.
Keep documentation discoverable for self-service support with SEO optimization. Apply keywords, metadata tags, and alt text for images.
Continually validate documentation for the right level and against product changes over time. Gather reader feedback through surveys and analytics on popular searched content.
Tools and Resources for Technical Writing
Leveraging the right tools helps streamline creating and managing complex documentation at scale across product teams.
Authoring Platforms
Dedicated applications for writing and updating in-depth documentation like:
- ReadMe – Markdown based with version control integration
- Confluence – Feature-rich enterprise wiki software
- DocuSign – Includes document generation and e-signing workflows
- MadCap Flare – Specialized for large documentation sets
Diagramming & Mockups
Visual tools to map concepts and product workflows:
Style Guide Generators
Automates building a consistent styling system for branding documentation:
Version Control
Repository for docs enabling collaboration and edit history tracking:
In addition, utilize existing documentation from similar products as templates for structure and formatting. Leverage sites like Divio Documentation Hosting and Read the Docs showcasing popular open-source software documentation as pattern source material.
There are also ample online courses available from Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, and specialty providers like IDC Technical Writing Training on honing technical writing skills.
Helpful books to level up skills further include:
- The Product Is Docs by Curtis McHale
- Technical Writing, Simplified by Mary Slywester
- Write the Docs by Jennifer Rondeau
Finally, actively participating in technical writing-specific networks like the Write the Docs community helps exchange ideas and continuously improve.
Common Technical Writing Challenges for Product Managers
Despite understanding the importance of documentation, product managers often struggle to prioritize writing technical content consistently. Here are 5 frequent obstacles:
1. Getting the Technical Details Right
Product Managers without engineering backgrounds grasping intricate product intricacies pose difficulties. Mitigate through closely partnering with engineering leads and tech writers to validate accuracy.
2. Achieving Simplicity Without Oversimplifying
Explaining technical concepts clearly while preserving nuance is an art—especially with complex products. Set expectations with audiences upfront on guide detail levels.
3. Bandwidth Tradeoffs
Technical vs. business strategy work competes for scarce Product Manager bandwidth. Get leadership buy-in on docs importance to secure time allocation. Take advantage of pockets between meetings.
4. Obtaining Reader Feedback
Early-stage products lack data on where users struggle. Proactively gather feedback through user testing documentation. Pay attention to customer support ticket trends.
5. Motivating Cross-functional Inputs
Rallying SMEs across teams to contribute expertise into a single source of truth remains challenging. Incentivize through docs-driven culture and integration into company meetings.
While difficult, identifying the high-impact areas to maintain rigorously updated documentation mitigates the above. Areas like onboarding flows, critical user workflows, and fixing top customer issues.
Conclusion
As products grow more complex, creating exceptional technical documentation becomes imperative for product teams—especially managers guiding strategy and cross-functional alignment.
Concisely conveying details through organized, scannable methods unlock engineering productivity, preempts customer issues, and speeds up solution sales. Documentation forms the foundation for spreading product knowledge across organizations.
Honing technical writing expertise takes consistent practice through activities like diagramming workflows, explaining capabilities to non-technical colleagues, getting feedback from user testing docs, and contributing to engineering wikis.
While challenging at first, sticking to core principles goes a long way:
- Truly know your audience
- Relentlessly simplify complexity
- Communicate visually wherever possible
- Modularize content for quick reference
- Practice continuously updating with product changes
By dedicating time weekly towards documentation, product managers can drastically improve technical communication skills over time – ultimately enabling product excellence.