What Your Delivery Chain Should Understand

While every product release delivery chain varies, they typically encompass three primary groups:

1. Internal Stakeholders: These are the teams that facilitate customer success, including operations, B2B and B2C customer support, partner relations, and internal training groups. They must effectively convey learning opportunities that enhance the customer experience.
2. Customer Touchpoints: These include departments like sales, marketing, finance, and HR, which, although less directly linked to customers, still need comprehensive knowledge of your product and business model. They must understand how improvements in the product enhance customer experience, engagement, and retention, and how these factors impact sales, market growth, revenue, and overall business health.
3. Customers: It’s beneficial to categorize customers into four subgroups:
   • Engaged customers
   • Existing customers
   • Interested prospects
   • New prospects

Each subgroup requires tailored strategies to ensure their success.

How to Effectively Communicate Updates

Once the engineering team finalizes the release notes, it's essential for the product team to review and simplify the technical jargon into accessible language. This should directly connect to customer success at every step.

Common delivery methods include:

• Notices: Updates about new releases are often communicated in two formats: brief notifications within the product and detailed release emails. The short message should succinctly convey the benefits of new features, while the longer message elaborates on how to utilize these features, when they are applicable, and where to find them.
• References: This typically involves help documentation. There are two main approaches: in-product references, which provide context-specific assistance, and comprehensive help documents that cover the entire application. These documents must be regularly updated and easily accessible, ensuring they remain relevant as new versions are released.

It’s crucial to keep visual aids and instructions concise and focused on the core use case from the customer's perspective, avoiding technical jargon.

Training: Maximizing Product Use

Training scenarios can be classified into two types:

1. Major Releases: Significant updates or new features may necessitate targeted training for both internal teams and certain customers, depending on the complexity.
2. Ongoing Training: As a product matures, a continuous training program for new customers and staff becomes essential.

A vital takeaway is that extensive training requirements can hinder product development speed. An important lesson learned in the startup ecosystem is that if a product requires extensive training to use, it may not have been designed simply enough.

Nevertheless, training should prioritize equipping users to succeed with features rather than reiterating detailed documentation.

In summary, effective release management provides numerous opportunities to inform customers about what they are receiving, why they are receiving it, and its significance. This sets the stage for customer success.

Joe Procopio is a seasoned tech entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, including multiple successful exits and some failures. He currently serves as the Chief Product Officer at Spiffy, a mobile vehicle maintenance startup, and is the founder of Teaching Startup, an on-demand advice platform. His insights are featured in various publications, including Inc. and Built In.

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