Five simple ways to improve your product communications

There is nothing worse starting the week with an inbox full of complaints from your users because they were surprised by the changes you deployed over the weekend. When you focus your energy on designing, developing and testing features, it can be easy to neglect communicating these changes to your users. Arguably, this is the most important part of the entire process.

This article outlines five simple ways you can nail your product communications to avoid those nasty surprises and reduce stress for you and your client facing teams.

Word of mouth

Don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth. Product folks have lots of conversations every day and they can add up to tens or hundreds of interactions a week. Always find a couple of minutes in every conversation to mention upcoming new features and changes and encourage your team mates and colleagues to do the same. You can quickly gather feedback and concerns and keep an ongoing FAQ list to document the answers for everyone’s benefit. Most companies have a number of standing calls that routinely occur each week, month or quarter. Why not ask the call organizer for a 5–10 minute slot to brief internal teams and stakeholders without needing to arrange a dedicated call. Your customers could also have regular team meetings, briefings and updates. Consider asking for a slot to announce important changes — particularly for your VIP customers.

In-app messaging

Post updates and announcements right in your product — as close to relevant features and workflows as possible. I encourage product managers to build in-app announcements and help as a feature that is fully integrated into their products for maximum control and impact. If this is not possible due to time restrictions or other priorities you can use third party products like Pendo and WalkMe.

Marketing support

If you have a marketing team, then it is time to call in some of those favours. Your marketing team can help you get a dedicated product update newsletter off the ground. The team can provide branding, design and marketing advice that will increase the impact of your communications and ensure they stay within the company’s brand guidelines. Brand your product update communications carefully and make sure it stays consistent so that your users get to know what they can expect when they read it. Provide a feedback channel that you action and include tracking mechanisms, so you can confirm which users have received and read the updates. Add KPI’s to your objectives that relate to producing, delivering and increasing engagement with your product updates.

Change log and release notes

The bare minimum for product communication is a changelog and ideally detailed release notes. These should be your priority if they do not exist today. Again, I would recommend that these are fully embedded into your product — but if this is not possible there are a number of third party tools such as FeatureBase and ButterFlye that provide a range of tools to author, communicate and gain insights related to product changes and news. You could also consider building a dedicated product calender that users can subscribe to. There are a number of advantages in building a calender:

1. Users will see important events in their calendar on their desktop and mobile.
2. You can modify events to change dates or details and propagate these changes easily.
3. Users will receive reminders prior to the event.
4. Information does not get lost in email inboxes or blocked by spam filters.

Third party tools like AddEvent can help you set up a calendar that users can subscribe to.

Events

Webinars and in-person events are ideal to communicate and showcase product updates and changes. They can be recorded and distributed with other announcements and will eventually build up into a useful product training archive. For longer webinars and events, ensure that you organize the content into sections that can be easily edited and broken down into smaller chunks of re-usable content. If you are new to delivering webinars or nervous in front of the camera, recruit a colleague to ask you a list of scripted questions. This will provide the session some structure, make it more engaging and help you deliver your first few webinars. SproutVideo is a useful platform for easily hosting video content that can be password protected. The platform also generates detailed statistics to let you know who watched the videos and how much of the content they watched during each session.

There is no point in delivering new features and improvements if your users don’t know about them or can’t use them. Don’t leave thinking about product communication until the feature has been completed. Instead, use the techniques and tools listed above to start planning your communications during the design phase. The requirements or the feature itself may be tuned as a result. As with most aspects of product management, it is also important to get feedback from your users. How do they find the current product communication methods? What improvements would they make? How do they compare to other software products they use?