Role (R)evolution I: PMs & PWs

In the last several years the job descriptions for program managers (PMs) and programmer writers (PWs) at Microsoft has blurred significantly. The set of technical skills and responsibilities for PWs now overlaps many of those for PMs. This is happening due to a change in business needs that affects how you as a technical writer or project manager, train, work, and market yourself.

Before going on, I should define what I mean by these job titles, since they're largely specific to the Puget Sound tech community: Microsoft, and by extension Amazon, which has inherited Microsoft culture through its hires. These terms are less often used in the Silicon Valley sphere, although understood, and not at all used in the Eastern US tech community. At Microsoft, a Program Manager is a project manager in charge of a feature set or product. A Programmer Writer is a technical writer who writes content for a software developer audience. It's important to keep these definitions in mind as we examine how they're changing.

Let's look at PM and PW responsibilities as they stand now:

• Content: PMs' primary responsibility is engaging with customers through writing and speech--blog posts, demo code, and presentations (live and video). PWs still primarily write, but the focus is on code rich content, which is procedural text with code examples, procedures that build a sample app, or demo code. The big clue here is the emergent new title for PWs at Microsoft: Content Developers.

• Publication/presentation: However, the publication venues are different. PMs publish on product blogs and present video via Channel 9 and attend tech conferences, while PWs still publish content via MSDN and the various "developer centers" for each product.

• Code: Both disciplines work on demo and sample code. Another relatively new job role is figuring out how to use third-party tools with native products. For example, developing Azure SDK for Java apps (i.e. Java apps that access Azure cloud services) using a third party IDE like Eclipse or JBoss. Then deploying them using Kudu. This is the personal experience of other PMs and PWs I know, and mine as well.

• Project management: Managing project backlogs has become secondary for PMs, as each team--Dev, Test, Doc--are expected to be "self-managing" so they can focus on strategy and communication. Usually they do their own project management via scrums. This seems more like how it's done at Google, although the latter's workflow is far less hierarchically structured than Microsoft.

This has deep implications for how PWs need to train and market themselves. PWs were always expected to interview SMEs, mine source code, test code, or technical specs for the information they needed. These are still skills we use to fill in the big picture.

Now, however, PWs need to think more like PMs in that we're expected to assess the customer's need for information, estimate the return on time investment, and engage with community (through research or feedback).

It has often seemed to me that we writers have lectured customers with conceptual mumbo-jumbo or thrown often vague instructions at them for tasks they might not even care about. Rather we should be writing as one person to another, as a peer who has already struggled with a task, and so can clearly define the problem, then show how to solve it.

This really was the right way to do things all along. And it's not only the right way, I'm enjoying my work more than ever.