I recently took on a small but moderately high-visibility project at work. It isn’t going to be a long-term responsibility, but someone promised documentation to a client for a feature that has zero documentation so far, and they need someone to come in and whip something up real quick.

I told my boss that I thought I could probably produce something in two weeks. He gave it to me, and this week I really dug into it. I haven’t actually done legit tech writing in a while, and a number of happy hours swiftly passed as I immersed myself in the project.

On Thursday I showed my outline and some draft work to the product managers to gauge whether I was on track or not.

After I demonstrated everything I had drafted up in Help Center and outlined what I planned to do, the senior vice president involved in the project asked, “How long have you been working on this?”

My heart sank. Had I totally missed the mark? Were they about to throw everything out? Did I just make the User Ed department look like a bunch of fools?

“Since Thursday,” (meaning about a week) I replied.

“This is amazing,” he replied. “It’s beyond my wildest dreams of what we could provide. It’s perfect. Carry on.”

Yessssss!!! I still got it. And now I’m super motivated to finish the project strong.

In case you’re wondering, that manager role is still a future path, but for now we’ve lost enough writers that my boss is keeping me as a strong individual contributor since he doesn’t need a dedicated manager for three people. As the team expands, I’ll still have the option to go that direction. But meanwhile, it’s good to know I can still hit a tech writing project out of the park.