It usually starts in a demo. There's a developer eagerly showing off a new feature—so new it's not in Jira. Not in any source I know of. It's just there. Why? Apparently somebody asked for it.
Why it happens
To be fair, most developers I work with have been good about user stories and following the process. I had one team in particular where the product department worked very closely with customers. Requests would come in and changes would come out. Great for customer support. A lot of playing catch-up on the documentation side.
“So what?”
“So What” is not just a cool Miles Davis track. As an undergrad I had it drilled into my head: if you couldn't answer “so what?” you weren't ready to start writing. In technical documentation, “so what?” is your end user's question. The answer is “So I can….”
The old model was a 400-page manual that walked you through every menu item without telling you how to do anything. Somewhere on the other side, a frustrated user trying to figure out how to get something done. We've tightened up since then, breaking manuals into topics and topics into tasks. Even in a topic-based format, a feature walk-through is unhelpful. The user story forces the task framing. Who is going to do something? What are they going to do? What's the result? The combination of who, what, why, and so I can is what separates useful documentation from noise.
The tool
All I needed was a one-liner. If the user story didn't exist, I had to generate one, so I built a little spreadsheet in Excel that did just that.
Why Excel? Because everyone has it, the formulas are simple, and it can be shared with anyone willing to fill it in. No training required. It exists and it works.
Three columns of input:
| User persona | Task | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Technical writer | know what this function is for | write about it. |
Behind the scenes are text strings and CONCAT formulas in hidden columns, with a paste-values column at the end to produce usable text. Columns A, C, and D hold the text strings:
| As a | I want to | so I can |
|---|---|---|
| As a | I want to | so I can |
Column G concatenates everything:
| User story |
|---|
=CONCAT(A2," ",B2," ",C2," ",D2," ",E2," ",F2) |
| As a Technical writer I want to know what this function is for so I can write about it. |
A second tab has a note: “Use Paste Special - Paste Values.” The usable text stays out of the way of the data entry and formulas.
In practice
In a typical session I'd ask the questions and fill it in myself. If the SME seemed receptive I'd show them what I was doing. At the end I'd give them the final sentence to validate: one complete sentence, easy to confirm or correct. Product team was happy. Service team was happy. The tool made the interview feel low-stakes.
Every feature has a “so I can.” If nobody can answer it, that's the real problem—not the missing documentation. Technical writing is 80% interviewing.