Emily B Flynn

As the Senior Content Specialist for AI on the CX Global team at Dropbox, I was charged with taking complex technical information, distilling it into concise and SEO-driven explanations, filtering it through the Dropbox voice, making sure it tracks with everyone from legal to engineering, helping the Content Ops team stage and publish, and making sure everything gets correctly localized by deadline. 

Some examples of projects I’ve been part of at Dropbox:

• Lead Content Specialist on the team working on Apple File Provider and Windows Cloud Files migrations.
• Lead Technical Writer, Help Center Content Strategist, and Agent Support Content Writer for Dropbox AI and the Dropbox AI Privacy Control Center. 
• Lead Technical Writer and Agent Support Content Writer for the Dropbox Backup Beta migration. 
• Lead Technical Writer and Content Strategist for the Dropbox Sign API Dashboard project. 
• Content Specialist part of the Dropbox Sign and Dropbox Forms third-party integration content and technical documentation content writing. 
• Editorial Council delegate for the Global CX Team.
• Co-lead on the team auditing, reviewing, and rewriting updates to the Dropbox Manual of Style. Reviewing, editing, collating, and using these guideline updates to help train internal AI proofreading software. 

Working through the development of how we talk about emerging technologies at Dropbox and being tasked with distilling it into plain language I find to be a really exciting process. For example, since Dropbox has users who store their photos of their grandkid’s graduation, Fortune 500 companies who store over 300K files on our servers, and app developers taking advantage of our APIs, explaining a concept like natural language search using AI in a way were that broad of a scope of users might understand it takes a lot more out of me than just sitting and typing. 

Months of research, reading beta tester interviews, talking to engineers, sitting in editorial council meetings…all to crystalize maybe three sentences in one article. It can feel maddening, but I once spent half a day getting a UN Security Council debrief on how the word “and” in a proposed convention on Darfur took three hours to discuss because China and Russia didn’t like it. Comparatively, Dropbox likes to remind us we’re not saving the world, we’re just trying to make great products which “just work” and we totally do. This has been a great entry into working in tech after writing about tech for years. 

Within the team working on Help Center content and agent support tools, we spend a lot of time building content which enforces consumer trust in Dropbox products. That includes explaining how there can be simple solutions to technical issues, and expands out to how this cloud storage and increasingly AI-driven company keeps user files secure and private. Some tech, frankly, is scary. Dropbox seems to have decided to hire a team of poets and MFAs to tell people about how we’re making AI “more human” and file searching more manageable, which has been a hilarious and exciting team situation for me. Also, I think that imported creativity has made for some great content. 

The boring important stuff here is that I use Okta, Jira, Zendesk, Adobe Experience Manager, Figma, Confluence, ChatGPT, Bard, and Writer everyday. For each project, I write public Help Center content as well as complementary content for our CX agents like Knowledge Box articles and macros. 

The exciting important stuff is working with dozens of stakeholders from Product Managers to Legal to UX designers and Engineers to be able to understand the functions and designs within existing and new products and turn that into easy-to-understand content. My background in legal and clinical writing for lay folks has helped me a lot in tackling complex technical information. Luckily, I find researching to often be the best part of writing — certainly more fun than 6 rounds of edits after a slight UI copy change. For example, I once spent two months watching videos on coding for children as part of writing that API Dashboard project. It helped! 

Finding creativity in technical writing is the high point of this contract, along with learning so much from my teammates and colleagues. 

September 2022 – present