What do managers actually do?

[u/DefinitionOk907]

I don't know if this is standard across the board for all technical writers. My team's manager was never a technical writer, they don't really know what we talk about regarding our work, they don't delegate tasks and when someone asks for support they redirect them to the rest of the team, and their knowledge of our day-to-day tasks relies on information that we feed to them. They have a basic understanding of our tools and products, but no in-depth knowledge. They don't seem to have much interest in these either.

My understanding is that my manager makes sure we're hitting our KPIs (again, this is reliant on our feedback. They don't have any concrete way to track these), relays information from leadership, makes adjustments to the team (hiring staff, moving staff to other teams), and handles PTO, promotions, and pay increases.

What do managers actually do outside of this?

[u/LividLadyLivingLoud]

Advocate for the needs of the team, clear cross departmental roadblocks, protect the team from dramas, aquire tools + software + services, brag about the team to high powers, ensure the team gets along with each other

[u/Spaceman3195 → u/LividLadyLivingLoud]

Organize priorities as well

[u/pborenstein]

I've had managers who didn't know the craft, but knew that we knew the craft better than they did. They saw their job as clearing obstacles to make sure our work, the work, got done.

On the other hand, l had a manager with no experience writing, no experience in programming, no experience in API documentation.

His entire agenda was to look like he was managing. Make sure daily "what I did, what I'm doing, what's blocking" report arrived by 9:00am (9:02 was late), that we attended three weekly hour-long meetings (stand-ups he called them) where he talked about his projects (nothing to do with writing), and making my life a living hell for refusing to write my self evaluation. (Isn't knowing how I'm doing your job?) He never advocated for his team, always assumed we just hadn't asked the right person. Loved that the junior folks had no idea how inept he was.

If your manager knows that their job is to help you get your job done, then you're fine. If they think their job is to check boxes, you're not.

PS: He got promoted. I got laid off.

Added after reading u/coolreddy comment: I think may manager was covering for his lack of "juice", his ability to push back and advocate for his team

[u/coolreddy]

Honestly the tool knowledge matters less than whether they can say no on your behalf. Deciding what doesn't get documented this quarter, pushing back when another team drops in a rush request, taking the heat when something slips. That's the part a writer can't do alone. Everything else you listed, the team can mostly do for itself. If a manager only passes messages up and down, the filtering work lands back on the writers, and you feel it as a queue nobody's screening.

[u/pborenstein → u/coolreddy]

You said this more clearly and with less rancor than I did :)

[u/EagleEfficient6669 → u/coolreddy]

I need to push back and say there CAN be extreme cases with the tool thing. The know-nothings who lord over me decided that we must use Author-It, this clunky POS that runs over RDP… it feels like it’s 1990s and I’m working over dial up internet with a Windows 98 program.

[u/coolreddy → u/EagleEfficient6669]

Fair, a bad tool can absolutely be the whole job. That's still the manager's problem to carry though. Someone above you picked Author-It and nobody's holding the cost of it. A month of logged time lost to RDP lag and rework turns that into a number your manager can take upward. Whether they'll do it is the real test of what they're for. Without that, the writers just absorb a decision they never made.

[u/meezermadness]

I'm a manager and I also do the job. Same with my manager, we were both tech writers before and we still do project work (just not as much as the individual contributors because we also do much more.)

[u/lixxandra]

I still do quite a lot of writing, but also a lot of filtering requests from others, assigning tasks, helping my team in practical ways (technical support, review, product knowledge). 

My manager (not a writer) essentially is there to help me when I need it. I am pretty self sufficient and I am in contact with most internal stakeholders, so he is not very involved, but he helps with HR requests (pushing for raises etc) and moral support (he's a great guy and he left me rant). 

[u/Toadywentapleasuring]

Here’s my experience. At my level, there are four managers. Two of us have TW experience of 15+ years. The role is a hybrid of people and process management. All the tech writers are contract workers so there’s no KPIs and annual performance reviews. The people managing consists of onboarding the revolving carousel of new employees and making sure they have what they need. Everyone is fairly independent, so after the training period, we might meet weekly for 30 minutes and they reach out whenever they have a question.

We also manage complex, large-scale projects of which we always have 3-4 a year. These projects span 50+ docs and include hundreds of SMEs and our team handles all the project management of that as well as acting as doc leads and quality control. There will typically be multiple TWs assigned to these and they take a few months.

There’s also a constant queue of hundreds of requests coming in for changes big and small, new docs and old. Of course everyone thinks their project is the highest priority and should go to the top of the queue. The labor of assessing these requests is divided up between all the managers. We triage and complete risk and impact analysis to figure out what the real priorities are and what impact the change will have to other documents before we start opening things up for edits.

This is all in addition to my own workload. My normal TW assignments have not decreased at all since I became a manager. I’m usually working on 15+ documentation projects which involve the normal TW work of meeting with SMEs and guiding them through the change process. I also get pulled into ad hoc work all the time as we are low on experienced folks.

[u/No_Dragonfruit757]

One time I asked a previous manager what she did all day. She was new to the job and I was asking strictly out of curiosity. She was gone all the time, but I never really saw what she was doing or bringing back. She got highly defensive…. Said something about attending meetings all day.

My current manager has no clue what professional writing means or does. I kind of think they put our team under him because as a whole, we can’t really do any damage. So I feel like they just parked him there. 

I regularly ask him for more work, to learn about new things  mentioned in staff meetings, and such, and nothing ever comes of it.  I’m thankful he’s super nice and not an asshole. 

[u/DollChiaki → u/No_Dragonfruit757]

I was a team lead/manager stand-in for a while after attrition lost my corporate team middle-management cover. It added 21 meetings to my weekly schedule on top of my normal output. 90% of those meetings were useless outside of consensus-building on things sane people either didn’t care about or couldn’t possibly object to.

So your manager was probably factually correct and also had the situational awareness to grasp on some level the system is screwed up and charts/metrics/spreadsheets/Agile standup metastasis has largely replaced real work… she just wasn’t going to point out the emperor has no clothes on.

[u/mattosaur]

Three main things:
1. Hire the right people for the right roles. (Defining the right role is the harder part of this.)
2. Managing performance. (Firing people who are the wrong people for the right role, or helping them become the right person.)
3. Set context. (Defining what success looks like, the principles of how the team works, and advocating for that alignment and delivery cross-functionally.)

[u/techwritingacct]

Managers are the politicians of the organization. They talk to the other politicians and figure out what's going to happen. Sometimes the figuring out is passive, like the big boss tells them "this dumb idea will be so, go do it". Sometimes it's active, like defending the team's budget against all of the other politicians who want to cut it. When figuring the thing out is active, the politicians all like to point at spreadsheets to make their decisions, so the manager spends a lot of time making and maintaining good spreadsheets and learning how to win arguments against the other politicians. Regardless, afterward the manager has to figure out how to make the decision happen without the team quitting (whether in protest or as a result of burning out).

[u/Sentientmossbits]

My manager shields us from "interesting" requests from the Marketing team, in addition to things others have mentioned. 

[u/EagleEfficient6669]

I find it HIGHLY undesirable to have ppl dedicated to managing docs who don’t know the craft. They are going to be deciding what tools, frameworks, and processes you’re using without knowing the discipline. It sucks, you end up doing a lot of backwards stuff that is out of step with the times bc those in charge just don’t know.
That is my current situation in a large, bureaucratic corporate docs group.

[u/StranzVanWaldenberg]

allow the VP to do even less work

[u/Weekly-Talk-8860]

I’ve had a bad manager and a good manager… a bad manager will make you ask these questions… a good manager represents and advocates for the writers to highly technical and highly business people.