Over the last twenty years, I’ve written close to a hundred technology white papers on a range of technical and business topics. My clients have included Microsoft, Dell EMC, Esri, Blue Prism, and others, with papers published under both the client’s name and my own. For all those papers, I worked with product marketing people. But much of the time, my clients didn’t have a lot of experience creating white papers; the process was unfamiliar to them.
To help change this, I've written a guide to creating effective technology white papers. My goal is to help product marketers feel more comfortable with white paper projects and, more important, to help them create better, more effective documents.
The guide walks through a multi-step process for creating white papers that involves people in three different roles. The process looks like this:
It also describes some common types of technology white papers, looking at the audience and content of each:
If you work in product marketing for a technology company, I hope this guide will help you create better technology white papers. It's available here.