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People sift through newspapers, journals, magazines, and World Wide Web to find the stuff they need—the right stuff.
Your information includes descriptions of your products and services, prices, discounts, special offers, your background and experience, service area, telephone number, e-mail address, and location, including directions to your offices.
Think of each of these types of information as a nugget of gold, and remember: people are out there, prospecting for specific information.
You probably use the same data in a variety of documents or publications. Just keeping each publication up-to-date is a major chore.
Hardware and software engineers design the infrastructure of a product and build the mechanics that allow it to function. The widget they produce for you probably appears to them to be incredibly and elegantly simple. Those who’ll use that widget may not see it in the same light, however.
Writers are also designers—a competent technical communicator has the experience and skill to design your documents effectively and efficiently.
Your hardware and software engineers cannot work in a vacuum, of course. Intuition only goes so far toward realizing a useful product. In the case of software, each development environment from the traditional System Development Lifecycle to Rapid Prototyping begins with the need for requirements analyses to inform the design.
Technical communicators don’t work well in a vacuum, either. Flexibility is important, but no writer can anticipate every possible change in an environment that may be called, charitably, dynamic. If your product development is driven by the rubric that “the only constant is change,” and if your development, training, and deployment deadlines are on a collision course, well…
Even if your developers use agile programming, the documentation they create is no substitute for the more detailed documents a good technical communicator will produce for you—the programming 
reference that documents the APIs and routines necessary to customize your application product, the database views—in short, the as-built documents that allow others to come in later to modify the product as needed. More importantly, designer documents don’t provide the information users need to, well, use your product. Your technical writers need the requirements and design specifications your team used to create your product.
Even better—for you, your product, and your potential users—you’ll use a good technical communicator from the start to produce your requirements analysis, design specifications, and other control documents. User, admin, and network guides and training materials are a snap to produce by someone who has the skills. You need us.