Presentation recording: Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey
Video recording
(I edited out the discussion segments.)
Audio only
If you just want to listen to the audio only, here it is:
Listen here:
Presentation description
Here’s the presentation title and description:
Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey
Technology’s trajectories include an ever-increasing acceleration towards complexity and specialization. As a result, documentation portals begin to mirror this same specialized focus, with a lot of niches and deep knowledge into single lines of tech. What gets lost in this world of hyper-specialization is the broad view of products and how they fit and flow together. The broad view — what the product is, what it’s used for, what are all the pieces involved, who is the intended audience, how does it fit within the larger landscape — gets traded for a hundred tiny micro-views of each part and how to implement them. The larger developer journey, if there is one, gets muffled by micro-paths leading everywhere and nowhere.
Because technical writers are generalists (who help shape docs across many different product groups, platforms, and services), we are the last hope for some semblance of higher-level stories and journeys in documentation. As technical writers, we can “specialize” in big-picture thinking, in shaping the developer’s journey through a systems-level product landscape. We can try to connect all the fragments together into a coherent whole. But moving in this direction runs against the flow of specialization, in part because much of what is developed is still searching for shape and form even as the code itself is being written.
Slides
Sponsored
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, agent skills, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my AI courses for more on the latest in AI and tech comm. If you're looking for info about documenting APIs, see my API documentation course.
If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in tech comm, be sure to subscribe to email updates below. You can also learn more about me or contact me.
Finally, I want to note a couple of things. I usually write the first drafts of my posts myself and then use AI to improve accuracy, clarity, and detail in places, so my writing is a mix of human and AI. (Hopefully that's not too off-putting.) Also, the opinions I express on my blog are my own perspectives, not those of my employer.