Job Description

The Content Specialist Team Lead is responsible for leading the organization's technical writing function while driving the execution, governance, and continuous improvement of enterprise knowledge management initiatives. This role combines technical writing expertise, stakeholder management, project leadership, and direct team leadership to ensure documentation is accurate, standardized, and aligned with operational and business objectives.

The Lead serves as the primary point of contact for documentation governance, manages the Technical Writing team, and partners with client stakeholders, engineering, IT Service Management (ITSM), operations, and service delivery leadership to drive documentation initiatives from intake through retirement.

This is a hands-on leadership role focused on leading the Technical Writing function, enabling consultative engagement, and ensuring successful execution of strategic knowledge management initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Capacity Management

Serve as the Team Lead for the Technical Writing function, providing day-to-day leadership, coaching, prioritization, and workload management while maintaining sufficient capacity to support the team.

Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop Technical Writers through coaching, performance feedback, and professional development.
• Coordinate work assignments, priorities, and resource allocation across documentation initiatives.
• Balance workload and capacity to ensure timely delivery of documentation commitments.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Identify training opportunities and coordinate skill development across the team.

Capacity & Delivery Management

• Maintain visibility into team capacity, project commitments, and documentation backlog.
• Prioritize competing requests based on business impact and stakeholder needs.
• Remove delivery blockers and proactively manage execution risks.
• Monitor team performance, quality, and productivity metrics.
• Provide regular status reporting to leadership.

Consultative Documentation Leadership

Lead the organization's transition from traditional documentation support to a proactive, consultative knowledge management model.

Responsibilities include:

• Coordinate and oversee the Technical Writer upskilling roadmap, including stakeholder engagement, project management, knowledge management, and consulting skills.
• Protect Technical Writer capacity to enable proactive discovery sessions, documentation planning, taxonomy improvements, and stakeholder engagement.
• Drive documentation strategy rather than reacting to documentation requests.
• Promote documentation best practices and governance across the organization.

Stakeholder Management & Governance

Serve as the primary liaison between client stakeholders, ITSM content owners, technical teams, operations, and leadership.

Responsibilities include:

• Build and maintain trusted relationships with client Points of Contact (POCs) and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Proactively engage client stakeholders to obtain documentation requirements, approvals, and outstanding deliverables.
• Establish accountability with ITSM content owners for documentation quality, ownership, and lifecycle management.
• Negotiate documentation priorities and delivery timelines across multiple stakeholder groups.
• Act as the primary escalation point for documentation delivery risks and stakeholder issues.
• Provide governance updates, risks, and recommendations to client and internal leadership.
• Serve as the operational buffer between client leadership and the Technical Writing team by resolving day-to-day delivery challenges.

Documentation Leadership

• Lead creation, review, approval, and publication of:
  • Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
  • Knowledge Base Articles (KBAs)
  • Runbooks
  • Operational Playbooks
  • User Guides
  • Process Documentation
  • Service Documentation
• Establish documentation standards, templates, style guides, and governance.
• Perform documentation quality reviews before publication.
• Ensure documentation remains current, accurate, and compliant.

Knowledge Management & KBA Lifecycle Ownership

Own the end-to-end Knowledge Base Article (KBA) lifecycle process from intake through retirement.

Responsibilities include:

Lifecycle Governance

• Oversee documentation intake, prioritization, development, review, approval, publication, maintenance, and retirement.
• Establish ownership and accountability for documentation throughout its lifecycle.
• Monitor documentation health, quality, and adoption metrics.

Program Execution

Lead execution of strategic knowledge management initiatives including:

Phase 2

• Validate Knowledge Base lifecycle processes in production environments.
• Measure adoption and identify process improvements.

Phase 3

• Lead enterprise-wide content audits.
• Assign documentation ownership across stakeholder groups.
• Implement mandatory review schedules, expiration dates, and automated retirement processes.

Phase 4

• Calibrate automated governance controls and documentation quality guardrails.

Phase 5

• Transition documentation governance into sustainable Business-as-Usual (BAU) operations.
• Ensure ownership, reporting, and continuous improvement processes are established.

Process Improvement

• Standardize documentation practices across multiple service lines.
• Partner with Problem Management to document Root Cause Analyses (RCAs), Known Errors, and permanent fixes.
• Recommend process improvements, automation opportunities, and AI-assisted documentation capabilities.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives that increase documentation quality, usability, and operational efficiency.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of technical writing or knowledge management experience in enterprise IT environments.
• 2+ years of experience leading or mentoring documentation teams.
• Experience managing enterprise Knowledge Management or Knowledge Base programs.
• Experience working directly with executive and client stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of documentation governance and lifecycle management.
• Excellent written, verbal, facilitation, and presentation skills.
• Strong project management and organizational skills.
• Ability to influence without direct authority across multiple organizations.
• Must work Pacific Time zone hours

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL Foundation certification.
• Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) certification or experience.
• Experience supporting Managed Service Providers (MSPs).
• Experience with ServiceNow Knowledge Management.
• Experience with Confluence, SharePoint, Jira, and Microsoft 365.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted documentation and knowledge management tools.

Core Competencies

• Technical Writing Leadership
• Team Leadership & Coaching
• Stakeholder & Client Relationship Management
• Knowledge Management
• Documentation Governance
• Knowledge Base Lifecycle Management
• Project & Program Management
• Capacity Planning & Resource Management
• Process Improvement
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Service Management (ITIL)
• Change Management
• Risk & Issue Management
• Executive Communication
• Continuous Improvement
• Customer Focus