5 Ways to Keep Front-Line Teams Up-to-Date on Your Product

A new feature is about to drop and it’s awesome. It’s going to help the sales team give more persuasive demos. It’s going to help your customers be more successful in using your product.

So why is it that front-line teams like customer success, customer support, and sales are often the last to know about new features?

Of course, you should have been involving them from the beginning and they should already know about updates. But if you got busy and forgot to update them, then it’s not too late to reverse course.

Because if you don’t update them, they’ll most likely learn about product changes through an irate customer or in the middle of a sales demo.

And that’s not a good look for anyone.

Keep the updates coming

Keep everyone happy with proactive updates. Show you care about their success and they care about their customer’s success.

All you have to do is equip them with some simple, short updates and basic info about the product. These updates can be short or long, written or recorded.

Here are 5 methods to help keep everyone on the same page the next time you release something new.

Release notes, emails, and newsletters

The first one is through short and written content. These are things like release notes, newsletters, and emails.

Beware though! Everyone tends to forget where release notes are kept and just lands up skipping them. And most people skip or skim emails. Use this one only in conjunction with others on this list.

Quick written notes & highlights

The next method is short and written. This may include a quick Slack note with a few high-level bullet points of what people need to know about this new update.

Now, this is useful because a lot of people live on Slack and they’re likely to see it and quickly read it. The only bad thing is that if you have a fast-moving Slack channel, these tend to fall off the face of the earth after a couple of minutes/hours/days.

Quick recorded videos

The next best thing would be a short visual communication like a loom video.
Walkthrough the updates and show them the high-level points. They’re more likely to remember updates when presented visually.

The same caveat as above though…these can quickly get lost in the noise if not posted in the right places or frequently enough.

Live (and recorded) walkthroughs and demos

If you have the time, try doing something long and visual and interactive. A hand-held walkthrough or demo with a bunch of people from sales and CS goes a long way.

You can schedule multiple walkthroughs throughout the week, record them, and repost them for those unable to attend.

Internal KB articles

Finally, the fifth option is long and written updates. Internal KB articles are a great format for posting about product updates. Your article can be a combination of both the visual content that you’ve recorded like the loom videos, screenshots, and text.

Now, hopefully, you have an internal wiki or knowledge base and people actually use it. If you don’t have one, then you may want to consider implementing one — as they’re great for this kind of stuff.