[justinclift]

> Our biggest marketing failure has been our documentation and resources. ... We're actually hiring right now for someone to help us fix this and make using Ghost a really fantastic developer experience.

Putting user docs as part of a marketing role is not lining things up for a good result. :(

How about putting it under engineering instead?

[holychiz]

User docs are customer-facing, and therefore entirely fitting to be under marketing. Of course building the documents requires engineering contribution for technical details.

[chipotle_coyote]

Yes, user docs are customer-facing, but the problem is that if they're under the control of marketing, then documentation priorities will be set as if they are marketing materials. And, possibly worse, a writer who works in marketing will by and large be treated by engineers like, well, somebody who works in marketing. (Without getting into sordid details, I'm speaking from personal experience of having been a tech writer under engineering at one company and under marketing at another.)

[johnonolan]

That's cool, but we literally don't have a marketing department. So whoever gets hired will report directly to me, no matter what their title is.

The primary function of the role is to do writing, not engineering - and the success of the role will be measured in terms of marketing, not engineering - so to me the title we went with makes the most sense. I can definitely understand the discussion here though :)

[justinclift]

> the success of the role will be measured in terms of marketing

Err... trying to grok that, and failing. Are you ok to flesh out what you mean? :)

[justinclift]

> ... then documentation priorities will be set as if they are marketing materials.

Thank you. This is exactly my point.

The only way making them a function of "marketing" makes sense, is if the leadership of Ghost view user docs as something primarily to bring in (new) sales.

As a person who has often done implementation roles in their career, having to rely on docs written by "marketing" people rather than engineers is generally a lousy experience. :(

[erikpukinskis]

I’d argue they should be part of Product.

The skills overlap much better there: user research, usability testing, copywriting, information design... these are all things UX teams think about and are part of making good docs.

The only similarity between engineering projects and documentation projects is... there are engineers around.

[justinclift]

Yeah, under "Product" sounds workable too. Under marketing just sounds (to me) bizarre.

Of all the places to put user docs, marketing is not the right one. :)

[privacypoller]

it can work though - sometimes the evangelist role is under marketing (with lots of cross-pollination); customer success is usually under marketing. Think more post-sale support (keeping customers happy and increasing engagement) vs. sales. I wish more companies focused on marketing to existing, paying customers instead of just new wins. It's (a) easier and (b) has real, long term value over short-term metrics.

[detaro]

How does it matter that the role for which they are hiring a developer to write docs is labelled "developer marketing" instead of "documentation engineer"?

[justinclift]

The focus and priorities assigned to whoever does the work will be set by their manager.

It's fairly easy to see that a Marketing manager will view the desired end result quite differently than an Engineering manager would.

With a corresponding difference in the focus and priorities then set accordingly.

[icebraining]

The whole company is nine people. I don't think managerial siloing is likely to have kicked in yet.

[justinclift]

Not sure. Placing the role under marketing from the outset doesn't seem (to me) like setting things up for success though.