- Drop the attitude. You’re not saving the world, you’re explaining something.
- There is no hill worth dying on.
- Learn to live with compromise and trade-offs.
- Ask for help when you need it.
- The things you plan, the things you measure, these are the things that get done.
- You wouldn’t hike in the woods without a map or guide, so use templates and a style guide when writing.
- Document everything — every decision and the reasons. You will find you need it when you don’t have it.
- Never come up with estimates on the fly, especially in a meeting.
- Concentrate on content and not design.
- Everything you write and publish is a draft.
- First drafts are crap.
- Use team members as resources. They’re smarter than you about the product.
- Be a resource for team members. You’re smarter than they are about writing. Probably.
- Let everyone on the team review your documents — and acknowledge their help.
- Everyone will have an opinion on something they didn’t write.
- Engage with AI to help find patterns and suggestions. Don’t use it to write content.
- Check everything for spelling, grammar, and style.
- Use hyphens, en-dashes, em-dashes, and other typographic conventions correctly.
- Edited topics and made changes are not acceptable commit messages.
- Don’t cling to a mistake because you spent a lot of time making it.
- Documentation is never complete.