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There is a persistent myth that technical writers sit around waiting for a developer to “finish” a feature so we can write the documentation. In this version of reality, we are the stenographers of the software world, recording what happened after the dust has settled.
The reality is much messier, much more technical, and significantly more impactful.
If you want to know if a product is actually ready for prime time, don’t just look at the passing green checks in your CI/CD pipeline. Ask your technical writer if they’ve tried to document it yet. Because the moment we sit down to explain how a feature works is the moment the user experience cracks start to show.
The “First User” Experience
Traditional QA asks, “Does the code do what the ticket says?”
Technical writers ask, “Can a human actually get this to work to solve the problem they have?”
Before a single word is written, a tech writer is often the first person outside of the core engineering team to install the software from scratch. We aren’t testing in a sanitized, pre-configured environment. We’re doing the “head-banging” work:
- Following the (often broken) installation scripts.
- Checking if the prerequisites actually exist.
- Seeing if the “getting started” guide in the pull request leads to a “getting nowhere” dead end.
If the writer can’t get the software running, your customers won’t either. At that point, the documentation isn’t the problem. The product is.
“Does it work?” vs. “Does it make sense?”
Software can be technically perfect and functionally useless. We’ve all used tools where the logic makes sense to the person who wrote the code, but feels like a labyrinth to everyone else.
As tech writers, we act as the UX conscience of the company. We look at a new PR and realize that while the feature “works,” it requires a 12-step workaround that will result in a flood of support tickets. In our testing, we see that implementing the current change here impacts a downstream component over there that’s actually managed by a different engineering team.
We don’t just document a workaround. Tech writers advocate for a better workflow that actually makes sense in the context of the whole software and problem our solution seeks to solve.
Hunting the “head-bang” moments
A significant portion of a tech writer’s work day is actually spent in the trenches of support tickets and sales feedback. We look for the places where users consistently hit walls. If the same question or problem arises again and again in tickets and prospect meetings, that’s something engineering can address.
The Vague Error Message: If a user gets Error 504: Request Failed, that’s a failure of the UI.
Documentarians are often the ones rewriting that message to say exactly why it failed and how to fix it.
The Silo Gap: Because we sit at the intersection of Engineering, Product, and Support, we see the contradictions. Engineering thinks a feature does X; Sales is promising it does Y; Support is waiting for the fix that does Z. All the while Product and Marketing are crafting a story to dazzle investors without ever even trying to install the software to see what it does.
The docs team is the one who forces the conversation that gets everyone on the same page.
The code is the source of truth
Contrary to popular belief, many of us don’t just “interview SMEs” and wait for a demo.
We’re in the repos. Reading issues and pull requests, including all of the comments.
We’re reading the code to find out what a CLI flag actually does versus what someone thinks it does. Then setting up the data on our machine to test that it works as described.
We’re posing questions to Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT to figure out what and why the code does what it does.
We’re in all the Slack channels checking conversations and asking our own questions about the intents of the programming.
We’re submitting our own PRs to fix branding errors, UI text, or logic gaps that even the best LLMs miss.
The Bottom Line
If you bring your technical writer in at the end of the cycle, you aren’t just getting late documentation. Rather, you’re missing out on your most valuable QA resource.
Documentation isn’t just a description of the product, what it does, and how to do it. Getting good quality documentation is the ultimate stress test for whether your product is actually ready for the world.