Hi, I'm Carl.
I bring business value to technical content.

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  Content Leadership Coaching

I've led content development and training teams as a practitioner, collaborator, manager, and strategist. My work environments span start-ups to volunteer organizations to large IT product development organizations. Now I share my experience in these ways:

• One-on-one coaching with content and training leaders to help them steer their organizations towards business success.

• Organizational root-cause analysis and interventions to help enable teams to perform better. 

Book your free exploratory session

 In this free 30-minute session for potential clients, we'll discuss your situation and goals to see how I can help you achieve success. Sessions are held over Zoom. 

Contact me

You can reach me by email here: cschat@msn.com

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Selected Work Samples

This portfolio showcases a selection of things I’ve had the opportunity to work on over the past few years. Ultimately the work is all about the deliverables. In this portfolio I tell the stories behind these deliverables as well. These narrative descriptions may touch on business strategy, project constraints, required tools and skills, and some "Aha!" moments experienced along the way. 

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Instructional designer 

Recent ID project: In 2021-22 I substantially revised the curricula of all three courses in the Professional Technical Writing certificate program at the University of Washington. Let's see it.

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Instructor 

I develop and deliver learning experiences for adult learners enrolled in these programs at the University of Washington, Professional and Continuing Education (PCE):

• Professional Technical Writing certificate: I teach all three courses in this certificate program. Let's see it.

• Storytelling and Content Strategy certificate: I teach the course "Strategic Content: Designing for the User Experience" in this certificate program. Let's see it.

Content strategist

I've worked with the job title of content strategist since 2015 and taught it in university since 2020 (see Instructor role above). However much of my work as a documentation manager prior to that required leadership in core areas of content strategy. These include information architecture, UX writing, editorial strategy,  and content engineering. I've greatly benefitted from close collaborations and mentorships with UX researchers and designers, instructional designers, data scientists, and business leaders to manage content as a business asset. Here are a few samples: 

• I led the work to publish product help into a gated customer community portal for a vertical IT FinOps SaaS developer. Let's see it.

• I developed a robust content management system (CMS) to support single-sourced publishing to diverse content formats and cost-effective content localization. Let's see it.

• In March 2021 Kate Walton of Steyer Content interviewed me about my journey from technical writing to content strategy.  Let's hear it; it runs about 45 minutes.

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Technical writer

I started my career as a technical writer in software development. My work spans end-user and IT-Pro instructional, reference and conceptual content. Following are just a few examples of my tech writing work: 

• Best-selling author of self-paced tutorials. I am coauthor with Tim Johnson of Microsoft Project Step by Step, 2000 through 2016 editions. These self-paced tutorials are category best-sellers with well over one million copies sold, and have been translated into multiple languages. Let's see it.

• Hardware setup job aid. During the beta testing of Windows MultiPoint Server I helped address a high-cost problem that surfaced in usability testing with an inexpensive, localization-friendly hardware setup reference card. Let's see it.

• Usability research, quick reference card. During the development of Microsoft Digital Art (precursor to the Fresh Paint app in Windows), I led longitudinal usability studies with professional visual artists and art teachers, and created a quick reference card for a kid-friendly and hands-on museum installation. Let's see it.

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