I served as a Technical Writer at O'Reilly Auto Parts, a Fortune 500 automotive parts retailer with 60,000+ employees. I built a comprehensive documentation program for the Enterprise Search Group (2022-2025).

Challenge

O'Reilly’s Enterprise Search Group had a disorganized documentation program. Multiple teams from software developers to business analysts created documentation independently with no standards, templates, or shared scaffolding.

This resulted in:

Inconsistent documentation quality and formatting across teams
No single source of truth for technical information
Difficulty on-boarding new team members due to scattered, outdated documentation
Redundant effort as teams recreated similar documentation structures
No knowledge retention when team members left, creating confusion when other groups needed to rely on our documentation

The group needed a scalable documentation framework that could serve diverse technical teams while maintaining consistency and quality.

Approach

I established the documentation program infrastructure and standards, building out the documentation workspace in Confluence serving as a centralized repository for all technical documentation across Enterprise Search in addition to my role as owner of API documentation.

Created documentation standards including:

Style guide for technical writing
Template library (API docs, user guides, release notes, integration guides, architecture docs, meeting notes)
Information architecture framework
Tagging and labeling for discoverability

Developed training documentation to onboard technical staff:

Confluence usage training
Style guide implementation guidance

Established governance with:

Documentation review processes
Quality standards and checklists
Documentation lifecycle management
Documentation Audit processes

Collaborated cross-functionally with international teams including Infrastructure, eCommerce, and UX teams to understand documentation needs and build solutions that served diverse internal stakeholders.

Results

Established documentation program serving 7 technology groups across the company.

Trained other technical writing staff in documentation best practices and standards
Created template library reducing documentation creation time by ~40%
Built searchable knowledge repository improving information findability for new hires and existing staff
Established sustainable processes for documentation maintenance and updates that continued beyond my tenure

Program became organizational standard for technical documentation and served as foundation for ongoing knowledge management initiatives.

Skills Demonstrated

Documentation program development

Confluence administration and architecture
Technical writing standards and style guides
Training and enablement
Cross-functional collaboration
Change management
Information architecture
Stakeholder management
API and Developer Documentation

ENTERPRISE SEARCH DOCUMENTATION PROGRAM AT O’REILLY AUTO PARTS

Matthew Taylor