Chapter 15: What I Do Now

I'm still asked what I do for a living. But lately, I think I've had a better answer—especially as my role has evolved from technical writer to content strategist.

"I help tell stories that matter to users. And I help my colleagues in documentation and training find ways to make sure we tell our customers what they want and need to know, and not just what we want to tell them."

And when people want to know more—and increasingly, they do—I have a real framework to share with them.

The Framework That Changed Everything

My quest for quality started with my failure to get promoted at Google, when I was told my writing quality wasn't good enough. That feedback devastated me, but it also sparked the most important question of my career: How do we actually define content quality?

The answer, as it turns out, isn't a single definition—it's a systematic approach to understanding quality through six interconnected characteristics:

Accuracy that's appropriate for your product's maturity and your users' needs, not just technically correct in the abstract.

Completeness that covers what users need to succeed in their workflows, not everything that exists in your product.

Conciseness that respects users' time and cognitive load while maintaining the warmth and context they need.

Discoverability that works with how users actually find and navigate content, not how we wish they would.

Consistency that reduces mental overhead across topics, documentation sets, and entire product ecosystems.

Meaning that connects information to purpose, helping users understand not just what to do but why it matters.

These characteristics don't exist in isolation—they work together to create content that truly serves users. When content has strong meaning, accuracy becomes more valuable because it supports something that matters. When content is discoverable, consistency becomes more important because users will encounter multiple pieces in unpredictable sequences. When content is complete and concise, it creates the space for meaning to emerge.

From Individual Craft to Systematic Practice

What excites me most about this framework isn't that it helps individual writers create better content—though it does. It's that it transforms technical writing from individual craft to systematic practice.

Teams can use these characteristics to evaluate content objectively rather than relying on subjective preferences. Product managers can specify what kind of quality they need rather than asking vaguely for "better docs." Organizations can invest in content improvements that align with business outcomes rather than hoping that more writing automatically means better user experiences.

Most importantly, these characteristics scale. They work whether you're writing a single API reference or architecting content experiences across dozens of products and services. They apply whether you're a solo technical writer at a startup or part of a content organization at a company with millions of users.

The Questions That Drive Quality

Throughout this book, I've shared stories and frameworks, but at its core, quality technical writing comes down to asking better questions:

Instead of "Is this information correct?" ask "Is this accurate for my users in their specific context?"

Instead of "Have I documented everything?" ask "Have I provided everything users need to succeed in their workflows?"

Instead of "How can I make this shorter?" ask "How can I respect my users' time while giving them what they need?"

Instead of "Where should this content live?" ask "How will users actually discover and navigate this information?"

Instead of "Does this match our style guide?" ask "Will users have a consistent experience as they move through our content ecosystem?"

Instead of "What does this feature do?" ask "Why should users care about this capability?"

These questions shift the focus from internal concerns to user outcomes. They move us from documenting products to serving people. They transform technical writing from a necessary evil into a competitive advantage.

The AI Amplification

As I was finishing this book, I kept thinking about how AI changes everything I've written here. Does a systematic approach to content quality matter when machines can generate documentation at unprecedented scale and speed?

The answer is: more than ever.

AI amplifies whatever approach you bring to content creation. If you don't have clear standards for quality, AI will produce more content that fails to help users succeed. But if you have systematic ways to evaluate and improve content, AI becomes an incredibly powerful tool for achieving quality at scale.

The six characteristics framework works just as well for evaluating AI-generated content as human-generated content. AI can help with accuracy by checking code examples and flagging inconsistencies. It can support completeness by identifying content gaps and suggesting coverage improvements. It can enhance discoverability through better metadata and cross-referencing.

But AI can't replace human judgment about meaning, user workflows, and strategic content priorities. If anything, as AI handles more routine documentation tasks, human technical writers become more valuable for the strategic, creative, and empathetic work that creates genuinely useful content experiences.

Where to Start

If you're feeling overwhelmed by everything we've covered, start small. Pick one piece of content you've written recently—a tutorial, a how-to guide, an API reference—and evaluate it against the six characteristics:

• Is it accurate for your intended users in their specific context?
• Does it provide everything those users need to succeed?
• Does it respect their time while giving them sufficient context?
• Can users find it and navigate from it to related information?
• Is it consistent with other content they might encounter?
• Does it connect to something users actually care about accomplishing?

Don't try to optimize across all characteristics simultaneously. Pick the one or two that seem most problematic and focus your improvement efforts there. Quality is an iterative process, not a one-time achievement.

If you're working with a team, start conversations about these characteristics. What does accuracy mean for your product and users? How do you currently evaluate completeness? What consistency standards matter most for your content ecosystem? These discussions will reveal assumptions and priorities that can guide your content strategy.

If you're leading content efforts across an organization, consider how these characteristics could inform your investment decisions. Which characteristic improvements would have the greatest impact on user success and business outcomes? How could you measure progress against these quality dimensions over time?

The Real Answer

Back to that conference conversation. The product manager I was talking with wanted to know more about measuring content quality, so I walked her through the six characteristics. By the end of our conversation, she was thinking about how to apply them to her own team's documentation challenges.

"This is exactly what we've been missing," she said. "We keep asking our writers for 'better docs' but we've never been able to explain what that means."

That's when I realized I finally had the real answer to that original question from my parents' dinner party. I'm not just a technical writer who creates content. I'm someone who helps teams systematically understand and achieve content quality. I help organizations move beyond hoping their documentation will be useful to ensuring it actually serves users effectively.

I help teams build documentation that users are grateful to find rather than frustrated to need.

And that transformation—from necessary evil to competitive advantage, from afterthought to strategic asset, from something users tolerate to something they value—that's what technical writing can be when we stop accepting "good enough" and start demanding quality.

The framework exists. The tools are available. The only question is whether we'll use them to create content that truly serves the people who depend on our work.

I think we should. I think we must. I think we can.

And, most of all, I think we should care.

Because when care leads, quality follows.