Stories

I was asked many times what I actually do at NXP. My answer was never satisfactory: usually this person asked me back "Isn't it boring?", and never really understood what my job is. Well, here it is!

My core skill is creating documents that explain technical concepts or procedures, and make them as accessible and useful as possible. That's what I learnt during my Master's degree*. Think of the help system you open when you're stuck using a program. I could have written it. However, at NXP, the writing part is only 10% of my job.

The central part of my job is to use my capacity to structure and simplify technical information to redesign how the documentation produced by NXP is created and published. As NXP manufactures electronic chips, a pretty technical field, marketing and technical documentation** have a lot of content in common.

Here are a few examples of documents, for the same product (except the brochure):

• a data sheet (very technical, by engineers for engineers)
• a product page (Web version of the data sheet)
• a leaflet (glossy technical overview that marketers print for events)
• a product category page (mostly marketing, introduces the product family)
• a brochure (marketer wet dream)

If you pay attention, you'll see that the data sheet, the product page and the leaflet have a lot of text content in common. My mission, in the long term, is to make sure these pieces of content are written, reviewed, updated, translated, etc. only once, and not on each single document.

The schema below shows how content pieces such as the Features and benefits and the General description can be reused in for the publication of documents for multiple products, with no copy/paste. The content pieces used for the documents dedicated to products are often too specific to be reused at product category level.

I am also in charge of configuring the publication of the documents you have seen: colors, fonts, layout, etc. I configure each publication channel once, and then the pieces of content are published automatically when they are released by the author.

Currently, it is only the case for the product page and the category page. The other documents  are still made by hand and individually with a lot of copy/paste from other documents: the data sheet will come soon, closely followed by the leaflet, and the brochure will probably come somewhat later given it has little content in common with the other documents.

My secondary tasks are the following:

• writing user documentation for the documentation editing and publishing tools
• training the users for the same tools
• representing the company at world workgroups dedicated to information management, such as the OASIS
• assisting the company in the selection of tools and the design of procedures for the translation of the content
• more generally, coming up with crazy ideas that question the well-established motto: "we have always been doing it this way"

* For those who have known me for some time: yes, I studied translation, but that was only during my Bachelor's degree (3 years). Then I specialized in Multimedia and Technical Communication during my Master's degree (2 years).

** The technical documentation helps the client engineer to know what the product does, how to implement it and to compare products. The marketing documentation helps the people who give money to the engineers to understand why it's worth it. Or not.

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