With this phrase stuck in my mind, I kept thinking about how natural it is for technical writers to feel inadequate. From underinvestment to the difficulty of measuring our impact, we might get stuck in a loop of feeling unappreciated. In this post, I want to talk about the mindset shift we need to make on a personal level to help our companies recognize our value.

The plague sweeping across technical writing

The title for this post comes from a great talk by Kat Stoica Ostenfeld at the Write the Docs 2025 Berlin conference. In Kat’s talk, she used this phrase to discuss the mental challenge of transitioning from an individual contributor to a team lead. The phrase struck me as super relatable, even outside of team lead work. The thought process being:

Do I have imposter syndrome?

No. People who have imposter syndrome are brilliant people who don't know their value.
I can't possibly have imposter syndrome because I'm not a brilliant person.
I'm just (select what's applicable):
- lucky
- not caught yet
- always overpreparing

As a profession, technical writing has a natural inclination towards imposter syndrome. It’s hard to measure your impact. Sales folks have quantitative KPIs, product folks track engagement and revenue coming through their product, marketing folks monitor views and clicks. Technical writers? Nah. It’s messy and complicated. For example, there’s this long-standing discussion: how do you interpret the amount of time people spend on a given page?

  • If people spend too little time on a page, it’s bad because it means:
    • They couldn’t find anything useful to them.
    • The title or navigation is confusing, and this page doesn’t cover the topic they were looking for.
  • If people spend too much time on a page, it’s also bad because it means:
    • The page’s content is too convoluted.

How much is too much? How little is too little? You can never win.

With the difficulty of measuring your impact, there comes a natural consequence: companies historically underinvest in technical writing. I’ve had conversations with people from other companies praising our docs and lamenting how bad their documentation was. How many tech writers did they have? Zero. It’s one of those “you don’t know what you don’t know” things, with companies not even realizing what they’re missing.

Gender impact

Imposter syndrome is common in women than in men. And technical writing is a predominantly female profession. In the 2024 salary survey conducted by Write the Docs, more than half of the respondents were women:

As in previous surveys, the majority of respondents in 2024 were women - 57% - with men making up 37.2%. 3.9% of respondents were non-binary, transgender or other, and 1.7% chose to not provide an answer.

I’d assume that women are also more likely to participate in a community survey like this. But even though this doesn’t precisely reflect the actual ratio of women to men in the profession, it more or less matches what I’ve seen in practice.

One of the things I catch myself doing is diminishing my job title:

  • Q: “What do you do?”
  • A: “I’m a technical writer.” (I do like the sound of “technical writer”, but that’s not accurate. I’ve been a lead for a couple of years already at this point.)

In technical writing, imposter syndrome often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We think we got lucky for some reason and fail to think of ourselves as capable. This shows up as not speaking up about our achievements (“why would I bother people”), not trying to track docs metrics or not communicating them (“who in my company cares”), and not being open to opportunities (“who on Earth would want to listen to my conference talk”). And for women, this tendency is often even more deeply rooted.

Organizational mindset shift

At the DevPortal Awards 2025 gala, Laura Vass asked me a question:

Do you remember an “aha!” or faith-changing moment when the appreciation of the documentation itself suddenly changed, or was this always the case?

When Laura asked that, I let out a laugh. Although I don’t remember a specific moment, I remember when I realized the mindset shift in my company had happened. Looking back on my experience, I do believe that a writer can influence how the organization as a whole treats documentation work.

The first step is your own mindset shift. You need to treat visibility and proactive internal communication of your or your team’s work as a non-negotiable KPI. I remember how I was twisting and turning at the prospect of having to do anything visibility-related. Just give me a laptop and let me write in peace! But this is something you need to push through. Engineers can afford the “laptop + coding in peace” approach because they don’t have to prove their value to the organization. Technical writers can’t.

Include it in your quarterly plans and put it on your Jira boards. Block time slots on your calendar. Don’t let thoughts like “it’s just me tooting my own horn” or “that would be so vain of me” stop you. It’s a KPI, so it’s your job. Nothing more, nothing less. Treat it for what it is: a work project that helps you communicate the value of what you do.

Things that you could do:

  • Changelog. You could establish an internal changelog for any content changes, where you’d publish a weekly summary of updates. Bonus: it could also serve as a tool for communicating releases, especially in teams with product silos.
  • Marketing posts. You could explain a complicated concept introduced by a new product feature, or share insights about your docs and processes.
  • Workshops. You could organize training sessions to teach teams how to write and structure their internal docs. Alternatively, you could share with them guidelines on public communication.
  • Style guides. Related to the previous point, you could share style guides. If no tone of voice or style guide exist yet, it’s even more important. Set it up, announce it, and share it.
  • Presentations. If your company hosts regular internal presentations, you could submit a proposal for a short talk to share technical writing principles and how you work. Bonus: if other teams aren’t following the “how-to-request-docs” processes you set up, this will serve as a gentle reminder of the correct way to do it.

And, answering the question in the title: yes, you are good enough. Time to beat the imposter syndrome.

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