Are your amazing new product features falling on deaf ears? 👂🏼
If so, it's time to amplify your product's voice! In this post I will share six easy tactics to create feature awareness internally and externally, so you can maximize the impact of your product improvements.
There’s an old philosophical thought experiment that goes: “If a new feature launches in a product and no customer notices, did it really ship?”… or something to that effect.
Product teams spend much of their time in the process of creating product improvements, but sometimes the very important task of creating awareness for their new features is only considered as an afterthought, if it is considered at all. However, it would be a mistake to underinvest in creating feature awareness. After all, what is the point of investing all the time to deeply understand a customer problem, find the optimal UX workflow, and code an elegant solution, if customers ultimately don’t know about or grasp the value of the feature?
Sometimes companies have functions like Product Marketing which can carry a majority of this communication responsibility. But often times — usually in smaller and earlier-stage teams — the bulk of the responsibility falls onto the Product Manager who worked on the feature. And because this PM is likely are already responsible for a broad range of topics, the feature communication task can often fall by the wayside.
Fortunately, there are simple tactics that can be used to get the word out for product improvements. In this post, I'll share a few easy ways to enable the broader team to help communicate new features, and ways to share product changes directly with your customers.
It’s likely that your teammates are collectively having tens if not hundreds of interactions with customers and prospective customers every day. Of course, Sales and Customer Support teams are especially active, but everyone in the company will have planned and spontaneous interactions with customers and potential customers from time to time. If you can tap into enabling your teammates to have a better understanding of the product you can multiply your ability to spread awareness for product improvements.
Better internal awareness comes with other advantages too. Teammates who see that the product is continuously improving will feel more confident that they are selling, supporting, or otherwise contributing to something that will help cusotmers. Additionally, teammates will have more assurance that the Engineering, Product Management, and Design teams are working hard to improve the product. Lastly, internal communication always creates an opportunity to celebrate the contributions of the broader team.
Let’s look at three effective ways to help the broader team understand product updates.
Whether your team is using Slack, Microsoft Teams, Basecamp, or another team communication tool, you’ll have the capability to create channels (or rooms) for specific discussion topics. Take advantage of this to create a designated #product-updates channel with the topic: "Where the Product team keeps teammates updated on new product functionality".
Product Managers can be responsible for taking 5-10 minutes after each product launch to share a brief update in the channel. To streamline the effort, you can apply a simple template to each update:
[New feature name]
- What: [Brief explanation of most important changes, and when the changes launched / will launch]
- Why: [Rationale for why the feature was built]
- Learn more: [If applicable: Relevant screenshot, demo video, link to additional explanation of product behavior, etc.]
- Thanks: [Mention and tag teammates who were involved in the process, including designers, engineers, and ideators]
Here’s an example of what an update might look like at a consumer banking product: