Decision guide: Do I need a Technical Author?

This decision guide helps you assess whether you need a Technical Author.

You probably don’t need a Technical Author if:

Your team has the time and skills to write good end user documentation themselves.
There’s a person in the team who knows what the whole product does.

You need to to provide written technical material, and:

It’s not obvious what content your audience needs and wants.
Your current content is poor:
- unclear, hard to find, out of date, inconsistent, contains mistakes, incomplete etc.
You need to create clear information, simply and efficiently.
You need to create many variations of the same document.

Your team <doesn’t have the time or skills or resources to provide this content.
You need to allocate resources more efficiently.
Your developers struggle to understand what it’s like to be new user of the product.
It takes too long for your team to create the documentation.
No single person in the team knows what the whole product does.
You need a Technical Author to act as a user advocate and provide an objective view of the product’s capabilities.

Customers are complaining about poor after-sales support.
Trial users are not converting into paying customers.
You’re losing customers.
You want more users to solve problems themselves.
You need a more efficient authoring, reviewing and publishing process.
You want to meet the legal requirements of selling consumer products, and you don’t have the skills or resources to provide this.
You need to prove you comply with external standards (e.g. ISO standards).
It’s a requirement of the contract with your supplier, and you don’t have the skills or resources to provide this.

Try out Cherryleaf’s online cost reduction calculator, you can see how much money you could save.

For more information, see Cherryleaf’s Technical writing services.

Want to discuss your situation, and explore how Cherryleaf can help you? You can tell us about your project, issues and goals. We’re here to help.