Change is a feature: Effective strategies for communicating product changes

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

Q: What did the engineer say to the customer in the release notes?

A: Minor bug fixes and enhancements.

Oops, sorry, that’s not a joke. But it is unfortunately common. Far too often, changes to our products are communicated to customers with a cavalier attitude—if it all. Which is a shame, as change is the most common, unifying feature across modern software (you know, software? that stuff all businesses are now made of?). Web and mobile apps, informational websites, and other digital experiences are constantly being updated and changed, often rapidly and invisibly, in ways that can cause confusion, frustration, increased support costs, and, yes, even churn.

Enough is enough. It's time to embrace change as the core feature that it is. In this workshop, you’ll learn:

• A whiteboard-friendly framework for planning change communications
• Common and effective patterns for communicating change within the product experience itself
• Ways of identifying which changes—like new or deprecated features, bug fixes, UI tweaks, policy updates, and more—are worth emphasizing, and to what degree
• Advanced strategies to manage massive changes to an experience (like a whole new interface)
• Common anti-patterns that can cause frustration, backlash, and even user revolt (and how to avoid them)