Shannon Daugherty

I’m an accomplished leader and user advocate with extensive experience in managing large, complex user assistance projects and teams while balancing scope, resources, and global locations. I have versatile domain experience and believe that user-centric content experiences can drive product adoption and customer success. I have managed through major shifts in technology platforms, authoring and publishing systems, and approaches to managing people. I take pride in building successful and happy teams while creating an optimistic, collaborative, and honest atmosphere. I adapt my management style to individual personalities, motivations, and abilities. I’ve learned that developing working relationships based on trust and empathy lead to mutual respect, loyalty, and productivity. I believe strongly in an embedded and integrated model for technical writing teams so that user assistance is an integral part of the product.

DITA, XML, Adobe Experience Manager (Guides, Content Fragments, Assets), Oxygen XML Editor, Arbortext, DocBook, FrameMaker, proprietary self-publishing tools (Oracle), Jira, Confluence, Slack, SnagIt, Figma, GitHub, Camtasia, Google and Microsoft suites

• Extensive experience with agile development, release readiness content, localization, accessibility, instructional video, and professional social networks.
• Implementing writing guidelines to enhance the accessibility of documentation and to enable more accurate localization efforts, including machine translation.
• Improving products by providing design and usability input, enriching search metadata, and using inclusive language in documentation.
• Successfully managing teams through change. At Workday, when my team was moved to a different org, we decided to lead by example and demonstrate how embedded we were as writers in our cross-functional teams. As a manager, I believe there's a balance to strike between empathy, acceptance, and problem-solving.
• Managing and leading writers as they worked with Large Language Models and Machine Learning for Workday's Analytics products as the writers 'trained' a product's LLM to produce better results. The writers loved this project and the engineering architects recognized that this was a skill that they did not have and we, as writers, did. It was recognized by executive leadership as such.
• Managing teams through strategic, high-visibility v1 projects that required significant shifts in content strategy, documentation architecture, writing style, delivery vehicles, and incorporating current trends.
• Flexibility with global time zones, with both working at early/late hours and travel.

• Anticipating change and planning for the future since change is inevitable and is ultimately what makes us grow: I've managed through org changes and acquisitions, technology shifts (on-prem to Cloud/SaaS, incorporation of AI), authoring/publishing tools and processes, and release methodology (long release cycles to agile). I think it helps to know what has come before to understand the impact of what's coming next. It's critical to explore how AI-driven innovation is affecting technical writers and plan for the future, such as Chain of Thought prompting and doc LLMs, and taking advantage of AI to enable writers to focus on content that customers always want but don't often have time to focus on: more examples, use cases, role-based content, cross-product workflows, and so on.
• Building relationships within and across internal orgs and collaborating constantly. I'm proudest when writers are deeply embedded in their scrum teams, not separated as 'writers-as-a service'. Relationships built on mutual trust and respect are critical to partnering successfully with peer and stakeholder groups. I've built strategic and mutually respectful relationships with many teams: executive leadership, product management, engineering, QA, program management, UX, operations, partners, consultants, customers, tech support, localization, accessibility, and legal. I work hard to highlight the value that technical writers bring to the table way beyond writing. I also focus on developing strong relationships with my direct writing teams, the most successful of which are very much two-way, supportive, and flexible. I've had the privilege of working with writers who care deeply about the success of their products and about each other.
• Advocating for customers by caring deeply about the success of products, customers, partners, consultants, and internal consumers of documentation content. I have managed efforts to gather and respond to customer feedback, and to work with internal or third-party partners to understand the pain that customers are feeling. Making efforts to understand customer use cases, workflows, and business scenarios are critical to deliver documentation that ties tasks together to help customers achieve their business goals. I strive to make sure we're not just 'documenting the UI' but are helping customers navigate their day-to-day tasks and experiences. One area in particular is readiness content - making sure customers understand what is coming their way so they can account for testing, sudden changes in the UI or functionality, or other receptors to new features.
• Finding efficiencies and eliminating overhead and duplication. I've worked to reduce unnecessary separation between writers and management when there's no need to gatekeep, handhold, or withhold information. This both empowers them and gives me time to be more strategic or impactful in other areas. I have also worked with stakeholders and other internal content producers to reduce duplication of efforts across functions and especially content from customer portals, knowledge articles, tech support documentation, blogs, and so on. I've worked to streamline content across the company to reduce complexity, repetition, and confusion for customers.