Let's talk about design …

Hardware and software engineers are designers by nature and training. They design the infrastructure of the product and build the mechanics that allow it to function. The product, or widget, they produce for you probably appears to them to be incredibly and elegantly simple. And, it is—to them. Those who use that product may not see it in the same light, however.

Designing Writers

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. Users, admin, and network guides and training materials are a snap to produce by someone who has this background from which to work.