Never Straightjacket The Expert with Arjan Ros of Reynen Court LLC
January 31, 2020
Arjan Ros, Product Director at Reynen Court LLC joins us to discuss how he got into documentation, how to work with expert writers and who he brings in to collaborate on documentation.
Find out more about Arjan and Reynen Court LLC here:
Key Takeaways:
How Arjan got into documentation
Arjan’s move into the world of documentation was by accident! He was asked internally to find a new platform to house all the documentation that Reynen court produces. He actually found and implemented Document360 and this lead him down the rabbit hole into the world of documentation.
Who Arjan collaborates with to produce great documentation
Arjan is not a writer himself, he collaborates with technical engineering, technical architects and product management in order to produce high quality documentation.
Organic search traffic through documentation
Arjan and Reynen Court are not currently generating any organic search traffic through their knowledgebase but are looking into this going forward.
Arjan recommends using documentation technology
Instead of using your engineers to build you own documentation solution, Arjan recommends that you find an “out of the box” solution to enable your product ream to focus on your product, and not on your documentation.
A simple hack that you need to incorporate into your documentation strategy
Arjan only gives his users access to documentation related to the products they are using (Document360 enables this). This improves customer experience as they are not daunted by a large amount of documentation that is not relevant to them.
The single training course that had the biggest impact on Arjan’s documentation career
Arjan didn’t share the name of the course but the most important concept it taught was that of “information mapping”, this covered information chunking, labelling and consistency. If you are interested, you can Google “information mapping”.
“Never straightjacket the expert”
Arjan suggests that if you are working with and managing product expert – don’t tell them how to write. Simply allow them to flourish and do not put them into a straight jacket as this will kill their imagination.
Instead, he recommends allowing them to fully document everything that they need to, and then go in yourself to restructure and edit for the reader.
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