How Martin joined K15t Software

K15t Company

Published on December 5, 2019 in

3 minutes read

This blog post is about happy accidents, career opportunities, a writer’s DNA, and Confluence. Let me introduce myself and tell you the story of how I became a K15t Software staff member.

Like so many good things in life, it happened by accident. When I first noticed K15t Software at the annual tekom conference / tcworld trade show – the largest techcomm event in Europe – I was working as a technical writer for a B2B software company.

At the time, I was stuck with a homegrown XML documentation tool. That tool was OK, but only three people on the planet knew how to use it (myself included).

The Numeronym that Changed Everything

Then, by another happy coincidence, I met Johannes, K15t’s customer advocate. Johannes invited me to a K15t event in Stuttgart.

I met many other friendly K15t team members at the event, and I learned that “K15t” is a numeronym. It’s short for “Kleineikenscheidt” – the surname of Stefan, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

I also found out about some of their products, especially the Scroll EclipseHelp Exporter. This Confluence add-on was the final piece of the puzzle for the wiki-based toolchain I wanted to create.

After I had finally convinced my CEO to employ Atlassian Confluence as a corporate-wide collaborative documentation tool, it was clear that migrating help content to Confluence and wiki-based documentation was exactly what I had wanted to do all along. I wanted a fun tool that worked exactly as intended.

A Fresh Perspective

We held a migration workshop, where Tobias, co-founder of K15t, came to our place and answered our (technical) questions at length. Confluence was successfully implemented soon after.

Finally, I had the feeling that anyone could be productive with this new, Confluence-based documentation system. Up to that point, I had never dared to let anyone else work on this job and the legacy documentation environment.

I was happy to know that others could now continue my work, and it meant I could take the next step. So I became a freelancer, working on my own. I was no longer a customer of K15t Software. But now, I was able to work with them on numerous customer projects. It gave me a totally new perspective.

From Solopreneur to Team Player

Both K15t Software and I came to feel that working together more closely might be a good idea, and things could be handled much more easily if we did. So a few months ago, we sat down together – and soon after that meeting, I began to work for K15t Software as a consultant.

I’m a consultant that knows what it means to write and maintain large volumes of multilingual documentation on schedule. When I go to meet our customers, I know what matters to technical writers, because I speak their language.

During my time as a freelancer, I had no one around me when I worked in back-office. That was when I realized that I’m definitely a team player, not a solo artist. It’s so much more enjoyable to come into the K15t office every day and have helpful, friendly and cheerful people around to work with.

And I like to travel – something that I was missing as a technical writer sitting in the same office every day.

Combining the Best of Both Worlds

Today, when I’m in the office, I sit next to senior Atlassian Enterprise Experts and very close to the developer teams that craft our content management add-ons for Confluence, Scroll Versions, Scroll Translations, and the Scroll Exporters.

This is helping me gain a far more in-depth understanding of Confluence – and I see first-hand how Scroll add-ons can be used for version and variant management, and when publishing Confluence content to different formats and platforms.

Writing remains in my DNA, so I’m glad that I can continue to write here at K15t. I’ve been blogging for years, but there are still plenty of things for me to do and learn. I contribute to the K15t Blog and many other resources and content assets.

Helping People Create Wiki-based Documentation

Another of my roles here at K15t is to hold webinars and explain our Scroll products to new customers. I really enjoy this part of the job.

So if you’d like to listen to my voice and learn something about wiki-based documentation, I invite you to join my next K15t Software webinar about content management with Confluence and our Scroll add-ons.

Perhaps you’ll hear me one day in a webinar or talking at a conference, giving you the exact solution to fit your current Confluence documentation use case.

But you can be sure that when that happens, it won’t be by chance…

Need help with documentation or other technical content to be managed in the Confluence wiki? Got any questions regarding wiki-based documentation?

I’d be delighted to help you. Just send me an email at info@k15t.com.

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