Who
Paying Somebody Whose Job It Is
Hiring somebody whose job is writing works better than most teams expect and has two specific limits, both of which are usually discovered late.
What nobody wrote down here, and what it cost
What the deploy order is
Known by one person who is in meetings
Asked rather than written, nine times
Why the import runs twice
Known by somebody who left in March
Nobody now knows, and it is asked at every incident
two things nobody wrote down · 14 occasions it cost somebody something
Two things, fourteen occasions, and one of them is now unknowable.
A useful operational baseline is to compare the writing burden with real work patterns; review it here shows one practical way to make that comparison without relying on memory.
For additional context beyond this collection, see the resources maintained by OptinMonster.
A quarter in which one team brought in somebody whose job was writing, with the expert time counted separately
Pages written by the writer, from interviews
60 / 752Sixty minutes of expert time across eleven pages; the writer spent four weeks
The same team's output the previous quarter
335 / 715Written by the team itself, at five and a half times the expert cost
Pages the writer could not produce
0 / —Three subjects where the reasoning was not available from anybody
Pages the team stopped writing afterwards
0 / —The habit lapsed within a quarter of the writer leaving
four documents · 395 minutes written · 1467 minutes saved across 102 readings · two with no saving claimed
Four rows, 395 minutes of the team's own time, 1 467 minutes saved across 102 readings. The first row cost the team a fifth of what the second did and produced more. The last two rows are the limits: a writer cannot extract reasoning nobody holds, and bringing one in appears to reduce the team's own habit rather than seed it. One team's own two quarters.
The option most teams never seriously consider is paying somebody whose actual job is to write things down.
It is treated as a luxury, or as an admission of failure, or as something only large organisations do. On the numbers it is frequently the cheapest way to get a body of documentation that exists.
Why it works
It breaks the loop described earlier in this section.
The constraint is that the only people able to write are the people with no time. A dedicated writer has time by definition, and the expert contribution shrinks to what only the expert can give — twenty minutes of explanation and five of correction.
It also solves the omission problem for free. A writer does not know the subject, so they cannot silently supply the missing context; they have to ask where it runs and what must be true first, which is exactly what produces a usable page.
What the role actually is
Not a person who knows the systems. A person who extracts, structures and publishes.
The job is mostly interviewing: sitting with somebody for half an hour, asking obvious questions, writing it up, taking it back for correction. The skill is in the asking and in the structuring, not in the subject matter.
This is why hiring a subject expert to write is usually the wrong move. They bring the same blindness and the same reluctance to state the obvious, and they cost more.
The first limit: reasoning nobody holds
A writer can extract anything somebody knows. They cannot extract anything nobody knows.
Where the reason for a decision has been lost — the person left, or it was never articulated — no amount of interviewing produces it. The writer will document the result, accurately, and the page will answer "what" and be silent on "why", which is the half people most need.
Teams routinely discover this partway through and are disappointed, as though the writer had failed. The absence is older than they are.
The second limit: the habit does not transfer
The uncomfortable finding in the panel above: after the writer left, the team's own writing did not return to its previous level. It stopped.
The plausible mechanism is that having somebody whose job it is removes the ambiguity that was previously resolved by one person writing voluntarily. Once documentation is somebody's job, it is not everybody's, and when that somebody goes the responsibility does not redistribute — it simply becomes unassigned again.
This is a reason to treat a writer as a way of clearing a backlog rather than as a way of establishing a culture, and to be explicit about which is being bought.
When it is clearly worth it
A large accumulated backlog, where the team has years of undocumented work and no path to clearing it incrementally.
A departure with notice, where somebody is leaving in two months and holds a great deal. A writer working alongside them for those two months recovers far more than the person would write alone.
A regulated or contractual requirement, where the documentation has to exist in a particular form and the team's informal pages will not do.
When it is not
A team that writes nothing because nobody has ever been asked. Hiring a writer answers a question the team has not yet put to itself, and the cheaper experiment — asking one person for one page — has not been tried.
A team whose real problem is that nothing is findable rather than that nothing is written.
The smaller version
Most teams that would benefit cannot hire anybody, and there is a reduced form that captures much of the value.
Give somebody on the team the role for a fixed period — a day a week for a quarter — with the interviewing model rather than the writing model: they do not write about their own work, they extract from others.
It is less effective than a professional and considerably more effective than hoping, and it has the useful property that the person doing it learns the whole system, which is worth something on its own.
Deciding which thing is being bought
The two purposes look identical when the money is being approved and produce different results, so the question is worth settling in advance.
- A backlog exercise: there is a large accumulation and no incremental path to clearing it. A writer will clear it. The team's own habits will be unchanged afterwards.
- A culture exercise: the team does not write and somebody hopes a professional will establish the practice. On the evidence above, this does not happen; having an owner removes the ambiguity that made somebody write voluntarily.
A team that wants the second is better served by the mechanisms in the two sections that follow, all of which are free and none of which requires anybody's approval.
Saying what it is for
Whichever version, the thing to decide in advance is whether this is a backlog exercise or a culture exercise.
If it is a backlog exercise, it will work, and the team's own writing will be no better afterwards. If it is meant to be a culture exercise, the panel above suggests it will not do that, and the mechanisms that do are in the two sections that follow.