Hannah Kirk

Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other.

She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking about how content is organized.

Hannah and I talked about:

#BlackLivesMatter

her background in enterprise technical writing

her transition to identifying as a content strategist

the history of technical writing

the benefits of component-ized content, especially compared to old-fashioned documents and publications

the shift in the role of tech writers form being publication formatters to folks more focused on writing

topic-based authoring and DITA and Flare and Oxygen and similar tools

how she's not a "typical" technical writer

the four times she has been the sole technical writer/content strategist in an organization

a confusing juncture in her career when she went to Silicon Valley and found that they weren't at the cutting edge of technical documentation :)

tools for technical writers - from Microsoft Word, to Framemaker, XMetal, Oxygen, Markdown, DITA, DocBook, and more

the benefits of Markdown in tech-savvy organizations like startups

the importance for technical writers of having a few more technical skills than other content strategists

how she engages engineers and other sometimes-hard-to-engage folks in conversation

her message to the content strategy profession: Don't overlook technical writers as an ally in your work, and likewise her desire to learn from content strategists

Hannah's Bio

Hannah Kirk (a.k.a. “The Pink-haired Content Strategist”) is a content strategist in Silicon Valley, working primarily with B2B software products. Hannah started technical documentation departments and worked as a lone writer at four startups. She implemented processes, authoring tools, CMS's, and publishing flows in FrameMaker, DITA, Docbook, and Markdown and integrated small documentation departments into larger companies as a result of three acquisitions. She’s now at Inkling bringing customer content into the Inkling platform and advising customers on best practices of migrating, organizing, and optimizing content. Hannah also started the Medium publication, Content Strategy Adventures.

Follow Hannah on social media

HannahKirk215 on LinkedIn

PinkHairedCS on Twitter

PinkHairedCS on Medium

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/2fg9DEufj1Q

Podcast Intro Transcript

Depending on how you look at it, the profession of technical writing may be the oldest branch of the field we now call content strategy. Technical documentation pre-dates the web by at least a couple of decades. And many of the practices now being adopted by content strategists have their origins in technical communications. Hannah Kirk has been writing technical documentation for more than 15 years. She has some great insights into how content strategy and technical communications can support each other.

Interview Transcript

Larry:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 70 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us, Hannah Kirk. We'll talk a little bit more about Hannah's background in just a couple of minutes, but I want to start this episode by just acknowledging that we are in a really fraught time right now. We're recording this episode on June 3, 2020. We're just a week or so out from the horrific murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests and other activities around that. I just want to say, we're not going to talk about that on this podcast,