Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna

42:18

S8E11 Before the Handshake: The Road to LavaCon with...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/10/09

Come behind the scenes with us before we take the LavaCon stage. What happens when two technical writers receive access to new AI tools, permission to experiment, and enough curiosity to keep asking, “What else could this do?” My guest, Elizabeth “Liz” Favre, is my colleague, experimentation partner, and LavaCon co-presenter. Over the past year, we have tested ideas, built prototypes, reconsidered our assumptions, and learned that the most revealing moments do not always arrive when an experi...

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53:55

S8E10 The Skills That Outlast the Tools with Ramesh...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/10/03

Technical communication has moved from manual printing presses to AI agents, but the hardest parts of the work have not disappeared. Someone still has to think critically, ask the right questions, exercise judgment, understand the product, and recognize what users actually need. Ramesh Aiyyangar, founder of Tech Write Pro and the Institute for Technical Communicators of India, joins me to reflect on nearly four decades in communication and technical communication. His career has spanned jour...

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44:46

S8E9 The Product Is the Context with Fabrice Lacroix

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/09/30

What happens when there is no single version of a product—and therefore no single version of its documentation? In this episode, Fabrice Lacroix from Fluid Topics joins us to explore how made-to-order and highly configurable products are changing the way technical content must be structured, managed, and delivered. We look at why traditional document-based approaches begin to break down as product variants multiply, and why granular, structured content, metadata, and product configuration dat...

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50:07

S8E8 The Content Architecture Beneath AI with Patrick...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/09/24

AI can retrieve and generate answers, but the quality of those answers still depends on the information beneath the model. If content is poorly structured, weakly governed, or divided into the wrong units, a more capable LLM does not automatically solve the problem. Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, joins me to examine how structured content shapes AI context. We begin by defining structured content and comparing the different approaches, from DITA and XML to headless content man...

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49:28

S8E7 The Work AI Cannot See

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/09/18

AI can summarize meetings, monitor repositories, categorize support tickets, and generate instructions. But automation does not eliminate the need to understand what customers are trying to do—or what happens when a product enters the real world. Vinay Payapilli joins me to examine the assumptions beneath the rush to automate technical communication. Drawing on 26 years in the profession, he explains how mapping documentation’s critical path changed the problem his team was trying to solve. T...

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39:43

S8E6 Documentation Is Becoming the Interface

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/09/10

Documentation is not just support material anymore. It is quietly becoming a product surface, a competitive advantage, and in many cases the raw fuel that AI systems use to help customers get work done. I’m joined by Nico Berry, a former technical writer who now works in product management at Contentful. We start with his move from technical writing into product management and the skills that carried over: technical storytelling, interviewing, and the ability to translate complexity across a...

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47:37

S8E5 You are the Product: Storytelling Your Tech Comm...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/09/03

Technical writers do work that can influence products, customers, and business outcomes. Yet we can still find ourselves described as the people who make things look good or “do the documentation.” In this episode, I talk with Nibu Thomas about changing that narrative. Nibu’s own career has moved through several S-curves—from manufacturing and quality-focused work to documentation leadership, marketing, and go-to-market support. We use that journey to explore what happens when you stop defini...

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55:58

S8E4 Technical Writing Funded An Entrepreneurial Leap

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/08/26

Video feels like the “obvious” way to teach software until you’re the one stuck updating walkthroughs after every release. We sit down with Sagar Garuda, founder and CEO of Zenious, to talk about the real bottleneck behind product education videos: the editing, the reviews, the sync work, and the high cost of keeping content current when a SaaS product changes fast. We follow Sagar’s path from engineering to technical writing, then through customer education leadership at fast-growing startu...

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47:04

S8E3 Sentient Design for Intelligent Interfaces

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/08/21

What if we stopped thinking about AI simply as a tool for doing our existing work faster—and started treating it as a new material for designing experiences? In this episode, I talk with Josh Clark and Veronica Kindred, co-authors of Sentient Design, about what happens when intelligence moves beyond the chatbot and becomes part of the interface itself. Josh and Veronika define sentient design as the practice of creating intelligent interfaces that are aware of context and intent and can adapt...

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61:48

S8E2 Content Is The Strategy

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/08/14

We talk with Lindsey Rix about moving beyond AI anxiety and experimenting with what AI can actually make possible for technical writers. Drawing from her presentation, Content Is the Strategy, Lindsey shares how she moved from experimenting with custom agents and AI skills to working with developer-adjacent tools, source code, and MCP connections. She explains why she starts with the problem rather than the tool, how AI is helping her gather and interpret information more efficiently, and why...

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48:02

S8E1 What Do We Lose When We Forget Our Work History

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/08/07

We talk with Sharon Burton, editor of Women in Technical Communication, about how women’s stories reveal the real history of technical communication and why our work is bigger than “typing words.” We connect documentation to revenue, customer stickiness, and institutional knowledge while facing the disruption and cost realities of AI. Episode highlights: Sharon’s path into TechCom and how the book comes together How the field flips from mostly men to mostly women over 50 years&nbs...

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54:32

S7E4 Claiming Space In Systems Not Built For You with...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/02/25

We explore how to navigate bias, claim space, and thrive in systems not built for women and minorities. Kae Williams shares practical ways to build influence, handle microaggressions, and reach senior leaders with competence and calm. We touch upon these topics: mapping systemic patterns that reward proximity over performancetying work to business goals to earn visibilityone‑on‑one networking and cross‑team collaborationscripts to approach CFOs and VPs for inputworking with ego‑first leaders ...

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47:04

S7E3 Who Owns Ideas When Machines Learn From Us with...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/02/10

We ask Julie Trostad how authors can protect their work in an AI-first world and where ethics, law, and new licensing models meet. From content fingerprinting to smarter metadata, we map practical steps, real risks, and hopeful paths for fair compensation. We start with the foundation: what intellectual property actually protects, how work-for-hire changes ownership, and why attribution still matters. From US lawsuits that punish pirated training data versus Europe’s stricter model for text ...

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54:41

S7E2 People Squared: Reinventing Work With AI

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/01/23

The AI tools arrived, the dashboards lit up, and the ROI… didn’t. Monica Marquez of Flipwork unpacks what actually drives meaningful adoption—and what kills it. The short answer: people and process, not just platforms. The longer answer: psychological safety, shared playbooks, and a clear path from micro efficiencies to measurable impact. Monica walks us through the mindset shift from fearing replacement to becoming “people squared,” where AI handles the drudge work, and humans double down o...

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35:20

S7E1 When Your Bot Writes Poetry For Execs

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2026/01/16

We kick off the new season by breaking down the “contractor mindset” for writing prompts — the key to getting AI to deliver to spec, not with unnecessary “flair.” Chuck Nealis joins us to explore how to write high-impact prompts through the lens of storytelling. We dig into the simple but powerful guardrails that help navigate AI’s context window. Because as conversations grow, crucial constraints tend to fade — and that’s when prompt drift begins. So what do you do when the whiteboard starts...

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52:55

S6E5: Smart metatagging tips for a path to AI-ready...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2025/10/08

We unpack how structured content and metadata make AI useful, reliable, and traceable across complex organizations. Regina and Max join us to connect strategy and tech, from RAG fundamentals to governance that bridges silos and boosts trust. Some highlights: How to define AI readinessMaking metadata part of authoring, not an afterthoughtWhy component content + semantic markup matterData fabrics, ontologies, and harmonized vocabularies What are the barriers to tagging, and how to overcome...

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49:19

S6E4 Audio Synthesis in AI: Breaking Down Barriers

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2025/10/01

Manny graces our show once more to share insights on audio synthesis, a technology that has evolved far beyond robotic voices into sophisticated AI systems. It has made documentation more accessible and enhanced technical communication workflows. Manny and I discuss practical applications, implementation strategies, and ethical considerations for incorporating audio synthesis into documentation. Key takeaways: What is audio synthesis?How the "curb cut effect" of audio options benefits everyon...

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43:46

S6E3 Beyond Documentation: Building Knowledge Systems...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2025/09/24

What happens when AI meets technical writing? It's not the end of the profession—it's an evolution that opens exciting new possibilities for skilled communicators. Kartika Raman, Lead Technical Writer at Salesforce, shares her journey from database administration to technical writing and now to the cutting edge of AI content creation. She explains how the fundamental nature of AI systems—probabilistic rather than deterministic—creates both challenges and opportunities for documentation profe...

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53:22

S6E2 Resume Robots and Chatbot Interviews: Surviving...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2025/09/17

Jack Molisani returns to discuss how technical communication careers are evolving with generative AI. He shares practical advice for navigating the changing landscape with pro tips in this era of resume robots and chatbot interviews, while emphasizing that human expertise remains irreplaceable. A resume should be a personal communication from you to the reader, not an AI-generated documentStop applying through applicant tracking systems designed to weed you out; connect directly with hir...

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53:57

S6E1 Empowering Technical Writers Through Agentic AI:...

Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna ·

2025/09/12

Kicking off our season, Manny Silva discusses how agentic AI is transforming technical documentation workflows and explains why human expertise remains essential despite technological advancements. AI agents are tools that extend our capabilities rather than replace technical writers' core skills. Learn why! Some takeaways from this interesting discussion: Definition of agentic AI as applications that take actions based on the tools provided to them.How common tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and ...

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