Always keep your customers in the loop about your product
I’d like to tell you a short story why I created Headway, and why keeping a public changelog for your product is one of the most important things you can do.
Around 2013 I co-founded a company, a few years in, I’ve noticed a pattern where customers would sporadically ask if the app was being worked on — this was super surprising.
Of course it was! Not only was it being worked on, there was a team working on the app, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, hundreds of changes weekly.
The question was caused by not front-facing all the changes we made, we only announced big changes, and because of their scope they we’re dropped every few months, and that’s just not enough to keep engagement up.
If your customer is invested in your product, they need to be assured the solution isn’t going anywhere.
Pushing sporadic big/medium announcements is simply not enough, if user engagement is what you’re looking for (and most likely you are), be sure to provide something in return — not only the product, but the conficence in it.
As it turns out all changes matter, small, medium ones. Be transparent about the bugs and issues addressed, nobody will tell you how much you suck because you’re being transparent about fixing issues, addressing problems, releasing updates.
What you will get is engagement and gratitude from your customer.
Headway was made with this idea in mind. It’s very easy to add changelogs, it’s easy to embed the widget so you can push changelogs to the users that are currently on your website or product.
There’s a lot great companies using Headway as their changelog: Buffer, Mention, Droplr, JSFiddle, Respond, Envoy, Gmelius and many more.
