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Transferrable skills: Technical Writer to Product Manager
- Moving to product management from technical writing is not incredibly common, but it makes a lot of sense.
- If you’ve worked with product teams and paid attention to how they operate, you have likely observed good and bad workflows and have an opinion on what works and what doesn’t. That is a huge asset in moving to product management.
- Technical writers are often masterful interviewers. Product managers must also examine something from every angle. Good interviewing skills will get this done.
- Technical writers ask how users use the product, what can be done with the product that users aren’t doing or using and how we can educate users inside or outside of the system to help them achieve a better outcome with the software. These are critical questions that product managers should also ask.
- Technical writers are used to breaking content into small, manageable chunks for user readability and findability. As a product manager, you must break large features into smaller chunks for engineering teams to work on.
- Technical writer quality that translates well to product management is being a curious problem solver.
- Well, guess what? All of this is product management: Understanding, deeply, software product development, leading teams to build the next feature, which you are also researching and evaluating and adding to the queue. If you’ve worked with product teams and paid attention to how they operate, you have likely observed good and bad workflows and have an opinion on what works and what doesn’t. That is a huge asset in moving to product management.
- Technical writers have to deliver a documentation product, regardless of whether it involves an engineering-heavy workflow.
- Technical writers that see the flaws in a system, and speak to how to fix them may make an excellent product manager. A skill that is usually mastered by technical writers who have competing priorities, deadlines, and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Not every product management skill was in my skill set when I moved from technical writing.
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