Building a Unified Self-Help Portal at Reltio

Scott Abel chats with Megan Gilhooly, Senior Director of Self-Help and Content Strategy at Reltio, about her vision for an unified self-help portal

I chat with Megan Gilhooly, Senior Director of Self-Help and Content Strategy at Reltio, a cloud-native data management platform. We delve into her vision for an integrated self-help portal and explore the insights she's gained in creating an outstanding (and award-worthy) technical product information experience.

A seasoned content expert and polymath, Gilhooly's expertise spans the complexities of generating, managing, and delivering technical documentation at scale. Her background includes working with software vendors that develop tools for content teams and leading strategies for innovative content creation groups that produce complex technical product information. Recently, Gilhooly's team was a finalist in the Software Industry Information Industry Association's 38th annual 2023 CODiE Awards in the Best Knowledge Center/Help Site category.

The Interview

Scott: Before diving into the details surrounding the unified self-help portal you've built at Reltio, tell our audience about yourself and the experiences that have shaped how you think about content.

Megan: Hey, Scott! So lovely to have a new label - "Content Polymath." Love it!

I've been in content my entire career, starting as a print journalist before websites were a thing. I went into technical writing and grew my career from an individual contributor upwards, and I've worked in all sizes of companies, from 12-person start-ups to Amazon. Every one of those roles inspired how I think about content delivery and content consumption.

Amazon influenced me as a leader, although our content delivery mechanisms were surprisingly archaic on my teams. There was a big appetite for innovation, so being there helped me think about what we could do for customers.

Scott: You've been an advocate for — and a practitioner of — evidence-informed change. What evidence did you collect to help inform your change-related decisions at Reltio? Provide an example.

Megan: I love the idea of evidence-informed change — keeping history visible in the rearview mirror to guide you while not allowing it to hold you back. I'm also a big believer in solving the problems that matter and prioritizing problems over promises.

What I mean by this is find the 1-3 issues that are critical to your team's (or company's) success, and then focus on solving those rather than thinking about your favorite software tool and advocating for it using a laundry list of promises you believe the tool could help you keep.

Here's an example from my time at Reltio where I prioritized issues.

We had a home-grown documentation portal and no taxonomy. We stored content in a software code repository. Our India team worked through the night every Wednesday to publish content. Not to create and review content but to publish it (something that should have taken minutes, not overnight).

Our process efficiency relied on humans behaving predictably and making no mistakes. We designed our process around tools, not content. And we were using software tools designed for purposes other than creating and managing technical content.

While those obstacles were challenges, they were also opportunities to create a better content experience. Solving our publishing problem allowed us to select fit-for-purpose software. Investing in the tech stack also provided us with opportunities to overcome additional challenges.

More importantly, when I presented the C-suite with data showing how and why our writers worked overnight, no one questioned whether or not we had a problem worth solving. Reltio cares about its employees, so it was a straightforward decision.

Scott: Describe the workflow used by Reltio to produce docs before making changes in the content production approach. And talk about the challenges those processes introduced.

Megan: The team had an impressive workflow. They had processes documented, and they followed them to the best of their ability. We relied on manual intervention while attempting to navigate a less-than-optimal tech stack. The team got requests via JIRA, wrote in Google Docs, went back and forth between subject-matter experts (SMEs), and then transferred the final draft content to XML using Oxygen. We stored our docs in BitBucket, a Git repository for software developers, and then moved them into our home-grown portal.

One of our biggest challenges was updating content.

Writers had to navigate a series of time-consuming manual tasks, jumping in and out of multiple software tools to create and deliver technical information. Writers and SMEs found the productivity-zapping experience frustrating and error-prone.