Leonard Porrello

Tech Writing Leadership Knowledge Management

About

Strategic content and documentation leadership with 15+ years of experience, including 7 years managing, in SaaS, cybersecurity, and enterprise IT. I’ve built high-impact teams, driven cross-functional alignment, and scaled content operations to support everything from product UX to technical writing, video training, RFPs, L10n, training, and education.

Specialized in designing and executing Agile and DevOps aligned content strategies that serve business and user needs. I’ve led large content initiatives, boosting help center engagement by 300%, and built systems that scale across 11+ Agile teams. My leadership style focuses on collaboration, mentorship, and making data-driven decisions to continuously improve.

With a foundation in English literature and technical communication, I bring clarity, empathy, and structure to complex content ecosystems and the teams that support them, ensuring that content is effective and user-friendly.

Focus

I’m focused on quality, agility, high performance, and ROI—for process and outcomes. I employ market research and analytics, and I approach knowledge management and documentation projects iteratively, as an Agile product manager. Collaborative and empathetic, I care about my reports. I observe, listen, mentor, coach, and facilitate in real-time, so that my reports can be their best.

Work Experience

I’ve worked in telephony (servers), enterprise resource planning, data archiving, genomics and genetics, data science, social (SaaS), non-profit enablement (SaaS), cyber security (SaaS), and localization, and I am able to quickly get up to speed and write intelligently about complex technologies.

I’ve implemented and refactored technical writing and training platforms (MadCap Flare, Help+Manual, Zendesk, WalkMe, Inline Manual, Confluence, Skilljar, Ingeniux) for several successful companies. I’ve written and edited thousands of “pages” of technical, UX, training, and marketing content for Fortune 100 corporations, SMBs, and shops comprising just a few engineers.

I was an earlier adopter of DITA-based help authoring tools, which rely on CSS and templates and facilitate topic-based authoring, single-sourcing, and reuse. More recently, I’ve been using SaaS knowledge platforms (help and LMS) to create responsive, tiered, multi-media networks of content that systematically cover the entire customer journey.

Goals

My overarching goals are often similar, regardless of industry or product:

  • Leverage AI as an interface to existing documentation so that users can simply ask questions and get instant answers.
  • Increase customer adoption and retention and reduce support debt.
  • Create and manage user-centric, cost-effective, easy to maintain, scalable knowledge systems, spanning UX to online help, that are as simple as possible while also being relevant and as comprehensive as necessary.

Please check out my Portfolio for samples, LinkedIn for work history details and endorsements, and contact me if you have any questions.