Your next role may be just one organizational chart away, but only if you keep all the stakeholders happy. In this issue, you'll see how you can navigate a transfer professionally. Then you'll explore what you need to do with your content to make LLMs and coding agents happy without compromising quality for human readers.

Making The Leap... To Another Team

There's a role on another team and you feel you're the right fit, but how do you make the jump? Switching teams might look easy from the outside, but there's a lot you'll need to navigate. When someone moves internally, one manager gains talent, while another must start a hiring process they weren't expecting. Move too fast, and you risk damaging the relationships you've spent time building. Move too slowly, and they hire someone else for a role you'd be great at. Here's how to make the move and preserve every relationship.

First, learn the rules. Many firms require a 12-month waiting period or written approval from a manager before you can even click "Apply." Confirm the exact policy with HR so nothing stalls later.

The good news is that companies recognize that retaining institutional knowledge is good business, so they are not opposed to internal transfers. The 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report shows more than half of career development champions see internal mobility as a rising priority. Salesforce filled half of its Q1 2025 openings through internal transfers.

That doesn't always mean your current manager will support your move, especially if you're a high performer they depend on. That's why you need to let them know about your plans and put their mind at ease. And you need to do this before they hear it from someone else. In fact, you can cause a huge rift if you talk about a transfer with your HR business partner, your skip-level, or even the manager you want to work for before you talk with your manager because those conversations will make it back to them.

Book a chat with your manager. Explain that you saw the new role and how it fits your career plan. Ask for their insights and support, and let them know how you'll support them through a transition. The sample script in TopResume's guide is a handy prompt. If your manager is experienced, they've seen this before. They'll be sad to see you leave the team, but they'll be supportive of your growth and development. They'll also breathe a sigh of relief that you'll still be around in case something comes up later. That's far better for them than if you left for an offer elsewhere.

Once you've briefed your manager, create a new version of your résumé for insiders. Replace any generalized numbers with real metrics your company cares about: latency reduced by 30%, onboarding reduced by three days, or specific revenue your work generated. Metrics go far when everyone at the company already knows the context. Most importantly, show how those metrics help your new team.

Connect with your new potential team. Book a few minutes with the person who would be your future manager and let them know you're interested in learning more about the role. Make it clear you've spoken with your current manager about it. Don't sell yourself yet; wait for the formal interview for that. At the same time, reach out to people already working on that team. This will give you context and a warm reference. It's also your chance to decide if the new team is a good fit for you.

Prepare a 30-60-90 plan that outlines what you'll learn, deliver, and measure in the first quarter. Then, share it in the first interview with your potential new manager. Busy managers can tweak a plan faster than writing one from scratch, and they'll appreciate your willingness to show how you can dive in right away and put your existing knowledge to work to solve their problems.

Offer your current boss a transition plan. Create a spreadsheet of all your current responsibilities and add docs, dates, and shadow sessions for handoffs. This puts them at ease, takes work off their plate, and reminds them that you're a professional who cares about the organization and your relationships.

Once you have the new role, make sure you share the transition timeline and keep everyone updated on the process. Follow through on any commitments you made. And be sure to publicly thank everyone who helped you make the move. A successful internal transfer is something to celebrate with those who made it happen.

If you're in good standing and you covered all your bases, your internal transfer should proceed smoothly.

Things To Explore

• Microsoft Clarify offers free heatmaps and session recordings for your content and can integrate with Google Analytics. These kinds of tools are often pricey, so a free option is great for content creators just starting out.
• Gumroad is open-source software now. The platform that lets independent creators sell and distribute digital goods opened up their codebase to the world, along with several other repositories. They wrote Gumroad with Ruby, and it's another excellent example of an e-commerce platform.

Help Robots Read Your Docs

With AI coding assistants scraping every code repository and help center, people managing documentation are adjusting to a world where people are relying less on Google to find answers to their questions. This leads to lower traffic and fewer chances for discovery. Instead of optimizing for Google, they have to optimize for AI.

It's still early days, but people are putting in the work to figure out what to do. It turns out that if you follow traditional best practices that help adult learners thrive, you'll help LLMs and AI assistants discover and recommend your content. You don't have to optimize your docs for AI at the expense of your readers. In fact, you'll make them better.

First, focus on the pain your readers are facing. Your readers search for problems they're trying to solve, not feature lists or a spec sheet. State the job to be done in line one: "Convert a CSV to Parquet," "Authenticate with OAuth," and "Batch-process 1,000 images." If all of your content is more reference in nature, it's time to build some how-to guides and tutorials.

Like titles, use task-based headings. Labels like "Create an instance" or "Rotate credentials" map to both Google and Microsoft style guides and keep keyword plumbing clear for search crawlers.

Link things together that make sense. For example, link the term "Authenticate" straight to your "Get an API key." Dense semantic links help language models trace concept graphs and let humans jump quickly. When in doubt, add the link; SEO penalties come from spam, not useful links that help people solve problems. Build tutorials and how-to guides on top of your reference content and link to the reference content frequently. Build the graph.

Stick to semantic HTML and a solid URL hierarchy. Use real headings instead of bold text. Use ordered lists for items that require a specific order. Use blockquotes for quotations. Use alt text on images to describe them clearly, and use clear URLs with a defined hierarchy. Those things are far more helpful than any experimental file like llms.txt, which most bots ignore today.

Embrace interactivity. A one-click "Run in Playground" button or cURL block turns passive reading into confirmation. Those interactive elements also help you identify pages that people engage with. But more importantly, it ensures the code in your documentation works. If it can't run in the playground, it won't run when the user, or the LLM, copies it.

Finally, learn about "chunking" and apply that to your content's structure. Pinecone has a guide to various chunking types that's worth a read. NVIDIA determined that page-level chunking was the best fit and that chunks that were too small or too large performed poorly. They found their RAG pipelines work best with chunks of roughly 200–350 words for most content, with a larger window for financial docs. Kapa.ai provides similar advice on chunking in their documentation, with additional guidance that because of chunking, you should keep problems and solutions close together.

Most of these fundamentals are just good, solid content practices you've used for years. The more you steer into them, the more both robots and humans will find the solutions they seek.

Parting Thoughts

Before the next issue, try these things:

1. Draft a one-page 30-60-90 plan for the role in your org that sounds interesting. Use this to work backward to think about how you'd make the leap into this role. Even if you're not looking to jump, the exercise can help you understand how others in your company do their jobs.
2. Split one tutorial into 200-300-word chunks, each with a copy-paste example. In a month, look at how it performed in your analytics.

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