Currently, my company updates a small leadership team about the awesome improvements we’re constantly making to our product. How do you communicate product improvements, large or small, to those inside your company? I’m looking for ideas on how to inform the broader company to keep them informed, interested, but not overwhelmed. Any tips about what to avoid would be appreciated as well! Thanks!
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Do you already do any kind of monthly or weekly update emails? Do other departments do? Is there a company wide one? Depending on what you release and how often, a monthly “here’s what we released this month” works pretty well.
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We do occasional demos at Town Halls. Not as frequent as I wish, but better than nothing
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For smaller iterative improvements my product team used to hold bi-weekly (in order to coincide with our sprint cycle) meetings with Client Success, Support, Relationship Management and Sales folks attached to our products.
We’d go through what was coming out, higher priority bug fixes, etc. etc. and demo/walk through them.
Especially earlier on in our faster-paced start-up days this was really helpful in keeping everybody informed.
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At our Company, we do what we call as weekly Product Demos. Every week we have 2 to 3 product teams perform a Demo of an actual working Software in a public forum with Mic and Large Display (More interactive and less static Documents like PPT) to the entire organization. Its optional to all audiences, so attendance may be less in at start, but we found that over time, other products teams become interested, especially those that have dependencies. This also promotes a culture of Demo across the organization. One person should be responsible to work with all the Product teams to schedule these demos on a regular basis to keep the cadence( I have been heading it for the past year). Please private slack me for further details.
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Oh - I’m assuming you already demo/train the teams that actually NEED to know about feature releases, like support, and this is more of a general company wide announcement situation and also not all teams get trained on all features, etc.
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That’s a good assumption @AmyWalker, and sorry I didn’t clarify. There are some all company communications in place, but they are sporadic. Thanks everyone who has responded so far, it’s good to hear how others do this. It seems simple, but it’s so important to keeping visibility high and everyone excited about the changes that are being implemented.
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At our company, we do weekly emails to the whole company. This includes all the stakeholders, POs, PMs, Devs, UI/UX designers, etc. This leaves very little doubts if someone is updated or not.
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One more thing you can do is, if you have a release you really want people pumped about you can do a little release party - send treats and sparking cider (or something harder…) to all the departments and a little info sheet poster for people to read key details on. What say?
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Oh yeah! We also do release parties for major releases!
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I’ve done screen capture videos walking through new features that people can view asynchronously. Especially helpful for distributed customer facing teams. Apart from that weekly mails keeps everyone concerned in the loop and leaves no room for any miscommunication.
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I recommend on updating the impact and not the features. If you got a good reaction from customers or increase in conversion then tell people about it. Even if results are negative and there is something to learn, its worth sharing. Product updates are boring if they don’t have impact. IMO
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We have a “Product Updates” Slack channel where we share what we’ve been working on, features released or milestones reached at least every two weeks. Everybody in the company is a member and we find it works really well for celebrating successes and keeping people in the loop. We try to stick to a simple format with each item in a bullet pointed list followed by a short explanation of the intended impact and how we’ll measure it. We always share screenshots and/or videos alongside this too where relevant.
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Our VP Product Management holds a monthly Product Updates meeting that includes releases and roadmap updates for the sales, customer/technical support, and marketing teams. Lasts about an hour to an hour and a half. Very helpful.
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My last company had a “#product-updates” channel on Slack, where PMs would communicate upcoming changes, along with any collateral.
Then we would also show notable changes during weekly all hands. Had a monthly cadence with CS/Sales for training on new features/workflows.
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This is such a helpful thread, thank you @VladPodpoly for starting it! For those who mentioned they send out weekly updates @MarioRomero, @PriyaVarma, @JesusRojas, @AmyWalker — How much content are you able to gather from just one week? How big is your company/product team/dev team? What does your development cycle look like? The CEO in my current company insists on weekly product update emails to the entire company, but I don’t see how we can get enough meaningful content during that time to justify a company-wide update.
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@YuriRoman, We were 3 sprint teams, with ~10 developers across those teams. We shipped pretty often, but there were sometimes weeks where the things on that slide were small or non-existent. It also included things that were “in the pipe” to maintain company visibility into in progress efforts.
It may useful to use that weekly space/outreach to ask questions or get feedback on top of “updating”?
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Good idea @MarioRomero - with a weekly update you need to accept it won’t always be big and not worry about - other people are gonna be fine with it too. If you have a week where you release nothing you can always say “We’re working on something exciting for next week, stay tuned!” or whatever. if you can fold the weekly update into some other weekly activity that might make it feel like less of a big deal - and then you should still have big bang announcements when you do something bigger. The point of a weekly update is kind of to show that its NOT a big deal - stuff gets released pretty often.
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Thanks @MarioRomero and @AmyWalker.
I should have mentioned that these company-wide weekly update emails are requested in addition to biweekly sprint updates during town hall meetings, individual feature release announcements and monthly roadmap updates.
Feels to me like the focus is on the updates instead of the outcome… 
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Whoa… yeah. I’d put your product manager hat on and go around trying to find out what problem they are trying to solve. They’re clearly having some issue and more communication was the proposed solution but it isn’t working (so doubling down on even more communication definitely won’t).
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