Man am I surprised to see this here! I’m the writer and definitely didn't think it was worthy of the Hacker News crowd. However, reading the comments I totally agree that this article can be summed up with 3 key points.

1. Sell benefits, not features
2. Speak like your customer
3. Use graphs to stress relative positioning (don't have it be filled with numbers)

I know the article itself is fairly sparse, but this came from a conversation I had with a Senior Dev at the startup I am currently at (where I'm currently a product manager). Our product is fairly technical (check out vectra.ai if you're curious) so we run into this issue of better copywriting often. This article was written for him and I ended up memorializing it in my blog for better visibility. One of the things I didn't mention as in-depth was making sure you understand who your target audience and who will be digesting the content. So, I thought I'd throw in an example below:

We recently rolled out a new feature set that has more robust support for some external connectors so now people in the organization can use usernames and passwords (SASL) to authenticate rather than needing to manage certs (I'm being intentionally vague given that FireEye just had a major breach). In the marketing materials around this feature, we stressed about how this would help the IT organization lower their time spent on support tickets. Why did we stress this? Because the people we are marketing to/selling to are usually CISOs (or at least a SOC manager). All they see at the end of the day is how effectively their IT organization is operating so they care a lot about minimizing the time they spend on frivolous tickets. When we did our initial customer interviews, we found that most organization we work with spend a lot of time managing cert issues when people not in the IT organization suddenly can’t authenticate into something. This was more pronounced during COVID as people are now working remote. The whole reason we even spent the engineering time to ship this out was because of the deeper emotional need to decrease these tickets.

The Dev I was talking about was confused why we weren’t conveying in our materials about the number of external connectors we rolled out or how easily analysts would configure this on the ground floor. It took a while and showing him this article to get through to him what I meant. And honestly, I totally feel for him. During this sprint he put in a lot of effort into getting this to work with a bunch of external connectors. By not giving the specifics he felt like we were not giving him the credit he deserved. If we were selling to security analysts, I’m sure we would have delved into those topics. However, most managers/CISOs just don’t give a shit about that. They care about how its going to help them work better and by proxy how good is this going to make them look in board meetings.

In general, this is the method I use when thinking about how to write good copy around a new feature.
What did we build: SASL integration with external connectors

Why did we build it: To eliminate the need for cert management

Why does the customer care: Decreases total support tickets that come from expired certs or other cert issues

Who cares about this problem: CISOs and SOC managers

Why do they care about the problem: They need analysts to stick to working towards goals set by board of directors/upper management. Analysts cannot work towards these goals if most of their time is spent dealing with useless tickets. If they hit the goals, they look good to upper management and if they don’t they could get fired.

After I fill this out I normally only focus on the why’s and have that be reflected in the copy.

I know technical copywriting is hotly debated topic at times (as I can see from this comment thread) but its honestly a lot of fun, although that may be my product manager self talking. I think a few great examples for great copy writing are the following:

https://basecamp.com/
https://hey.com/
https://www.blinkist.com/

If you have more thoughts, I’d love to hear them! Honestly, I might do a more in-depth Technical Marketing 2: Electric Boogaloo blog post if there is a need.