Hey! I'm Katya, the head of the technical writing team at Ozon. Now we have 9 people and a whole platform of documentation, but colleagues still do not always understand what we are doing.
Out of misunderstanding, requests of the form appear: “We want our own technical writer for the team, but we don’t know what exactly he will do”. As a result, the team adjusts to the trends and creates documentation for itself, but after a couple of months it turns out that the dock is not read, and the technical writer has gradually turned into an analyst.
Therefore, it's time to share experiences and talk about some conceptual things :)
Who are tech writers anyway?
I met different answers, from "guys who write unnecessary Talmuds according to GOSTs" to definitions that are quite close to my reality.
At Ozon, technical writers work globally in three areas:
user documentation (Help, Knowledge Base, FAQ),
external API documentation,
describing internal systems - from onboarding to complex architectural interactions.
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