Now Seeking a Technical Writer for a Fun US-based Company! (Part-time) [CLOSED]

Assist our team in documenting the technical requirements of a new app that we are developing, by defining it in words and data flow diagrams.

Job Description

1. Collaborate with our internal team of technical project managers, client project managers, creative director, and app developer in sculpting the features of the app
2. Further define the overall goals the app
3. Understand and define the specific needs for different “avatars” of the app, such as the Client Sponsor, Client Champions, Technical Users, and Key Users
4. Describe how each avatar needs to interact with the app
5. Describe the benefits that each avatar would expect to have
6. List the “Must Have" features & benefits for each of the avatars, and describe them
7. List the “Nice to Have” features & benefits for each avatar, and describe them
8. Create a Data Flow Diagram (DFD) showing how the data flows between the different users

What is a Data Flow Diagram (DFD)?

For reference, you can see examples here of what a DFD. For our purposes, it’s a more technical way to show the workflow for each app user:

• “What is a Data Flow Diagram“:
  https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/data-flow-diagram#discovery__top
  
• “Data Flow Diagrams - What is DFD? Data Flow Diagram Symbols and More”
  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VGTvgaJllM

Being Very Technical will Make you Highly Successful in this Role

• This project would likely last three to six months
• This is a part-time role at Town Web
• You would be expected to work up to 10-15 hours per week
• Pay will be $6.00 - $10.00/hour depending on prior relevant experience (e.g. Technical Writing, Technical Documentation, Data Flow Diagramming)
• We would have 3x weekly meetings with our internal team to discuss the project with the creative director, technical project manager, and app developer
• Our team meetings take place during business hours Monday-Friday in Chicago/USA time zone (GMT -6)
• Our team collaborates mostly over Slack and Zoom
• No prior experience with Data Flow Diagrams (DFD) is necessary, but you would be required to learn it within the first two weeks of the role. (And you would be paid to learn DFD on company time)

Town Web Can Provide You With a Fun and Exciting Career

Town Web is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin but has office locations in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Some of the Town Web team is distributed and they work remotely from their own home offices or from coworking locations.

In the past four years Town Web has doubled in size employee wise. We now have 16 people who handle all aspects of our customers’ needs. You would have the opportunity to work for a small, yet stable company that is building out unique technology solutions for a non-technical audience.

Town Web’s Customers Love the Service and Support they Receive in the Municipal Industry

Town Web’s customers are small towns, cities and villages in the United States. Most of our end users are municipal clerks or administrators who do anything and everything needed in their local government, and they absolutely love us! They’re the powerhouse who keep their communities together. Town Web provides them with the means and the technological solution to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.

We provide them with technological solutions that are easy to use and have more than 13 years of experience doing so. In the local government sector, we are already very well known nationally since we have over 600 municipal customers across 30 different states.

Our motto is “We Make the Clerk’s Live Easier”. This is why Town Web is chosen as the preferred vendor across 600+ other municipalities. Our solution is very easy to use and comes with awesome support.

Town Web’s Corporate Culture is Built to be Like a Family

One thing that makes Town Web quite unique is that we do not have layers of bureaucracy that stifle innovation and creativity. It’s a fairly flat structure and each person on the team is approachable and is able to help you succeed. Each employee has a lot of autonomy in how their job is done and there is no micromanaging whatsoever.

As of April 2020, Town Web has 16 total employees. Therefore we are not a company where you would be lost in the crowd, or where you would be looked at as just a cog in a machine. You would be considered as part of the Town Web family and be able to work with a group of people that you’d definitely enjoy hanging out with on the weekends and evenings.

The founder, Dustin Overbeck, had already spent nine years working in the corporate world before founding Town Web in 2007. Therefore he knew what it was like to work for large companies where people were just cogs in a machine, and where there was a formal corporate structure, layers of rules and bureaucracy, and where innovative ideas died from analysis paralysis.

Town Web strives to be a fun place to work at, where all employees are like family, and where we solve interesting technological problems for non-technical customers. We foster a warm, fun and energetic work atmosphere while solving technology problems for a non-technical audience.

We look forward to hearing form you!

Updated: Sunday, April 19, 2020

To answer some early questions that have come in, here is some more info that should help describe the role and the project:

• The app we are building does not exist inside our company.
• We are now writing the documentation and defining the customer avatars and the benefits they receive.
• In terms of soccer/football, your role would be that of a "midfielder". We are in a game and we are throwing you the ball. Your position is the midfielder and your job is to help take the ball down the pitch, passing it back and forth to your teammates.
• There are some apps that already exists which we can use as points of reference. Some of these existing apps have pieces, functions and benefits that appeal to our "avatar" customers. For all intents and purposes, we are building something different, custom and specific to our client avatars.
• Your role in the project is to help translate the ideas and input from three points view:
  • From a technical standpoint (based on what the techical product manager and developers say)
  • From a design/usability standpoint (based on input from our creative director)
  • From the viewpoint of our avatars (based on research, surveys and input that our project managers/account manager collect from the clients)
• Your role is to "translate" the requirements from a technical standpoint, from a design/usability standpoint, and from the viewpoint of our avatars.
• The deliverables are:
  • Providing thorough written documentation that clearly sums up the project
  • Data Flow Diagrams (DFD) to visually show how information, data and expectations transfer from one place to another
  • Essentially, the role is to have us define all the features, functions and benefits on paper first before writing any code, before creating any database tables, and before designing any pixels.