Communicating Change
Effective strategies for Communicating Product & Service Changes
Next session: Thursday, August 15 | Register now
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, churn.
Far too often, these changes to products and services are communicated to customers with a cavalier attitude — if it all. This is not only a risk, but a missed opportunity: Change is the most common, unifying feature across modern software.
This course will teach you to embrace change as the core feature that it is. We’ll explore best practices and learn a simple, repeatable framework for planning change communications.
Why take this course?
Communicate change in a way that reduces churn (lost customers) and support costs.
Increase customer adoption of — and success with — new features and offerings.
Help your team move forward confidently with complex or multi-stage product updates.
Who is this for?
Anyone who works on a digital product or service that might change.
Some roles we recommend in particular:
- Everyone from product marketing
- Product managers and project managers
- UX designers and writers
- Indie developers or any devs responsible for changelogs, update notifications, and similar user-facing content
- Technical writers and other tech-comm team members
- Support and customer service leads
- Content strategists, content designers, and other content specialists
Calendar and availability
Get notified
Join the waitlist.
Get an email when future editions of Communicating Change are scheduled.
Course details
Questions this course can help you answer
- What changes are worth communicating about?
- When do we need to communicate about upcoming changes?
- Do different audiences or user groups need different information about product changes?
- What content is appropriate or necessary for our app store updates?
- What kinds of notifications can or should we use to communicate product changes?
- What channels are best for communicating product changes?
- What information is important to our customers when it comes to product and service updates?
- How often do we need to communicate about a given change?
- What communication patterns lead to churn and/or support requests, and how do we avoid them?
- How do we manage communication around a major change like a new website navigation or new app interface?
- How should we handle “bad news” like price increases?
Overview of topics
- 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)
Prerequisites
You’ll get the most out of this course if you’ve been part of a team that works on websites, apps, productized digital services, or other digital “stuff” that might receive updates.
There are no specific prerequisite educational requirements. Classes and materials are delivered in English.
Curriculum Notes
This course was designed by Scott Kubie.