"I Had No Idea This Exists": The Feature Awareness Problem
A Product Marketing Manager told me something that stuck with me.
She was describing customer conversations about new features. Features her team had launched. Features they’d announced. Features that had been live for months.
The response from customers? “I had no idea this thing exists.”
This happens constantly. And it’s one of the most demoralizing experiences in product work.
The gap between shipping and knowing
Your team worked for weeks on a feature. Engineering built it. Product defined it. You launched it. Maybe you sent an email. Maybe you posted in Slack. Maybe you updated the changelog.
And somehow, when a customer needs exactly that feature, they don’t know you have it. They complain about the missing functionality. They consider switching to a competitor. They churn.
Then someone mentions, “Actually, we shipped that three months ago.”
The worst version: customers churn because they wanted a feature you already have.
I’ve lived this. At a previous company, we’d get cancellation reasons like “I’m switching to Competitor X because they have Feature Y.” And we’d look at each other and say, “We have Feature Y. We’ve had it for six months.”
Damn it.
Why announcements don’t stick
The math works against you.
A typical SaaS product might have thousands of users. When you send an announcement email:
- Maybe 30% open it
- Maybe 10% click through
- Maybe 5% actually read and remember the information
- The other 95% have no idea what you shipped
Now multiply this by the dozens of features and improvements you ship each year. Customers receive a fraction of your communications and remember a fraction of that fraction.
A VP of Product at a creator commerce platform put it bluntly: “Engineering does way more than anyone knows about. The new features are just the tip of it.”
The work is happening. The communication isn’t landing.
The ephemeral launch problem
There’s another dimension to this problem: launches are events, but awareness needs to be continuous.
A Sr. Product Marketing Manager described it perfectly: “Launches are ephemeral. They happen, they finish, and all that content disappears.”
You create a landing page for the launch. You send the announcement email. You post on social media. The launch week ends. A month later, a new customer signs up. They never saw any of it.
That customer has no way to discover what you shipped unless they happen to find your changelog (if you have one) or stumble across a help article. The launch content has vanished into the archive.
Meanwhile, your competitor’s changelog shows active development. Your most recent update was three months ago. Which company looks more alive?
The internal echo of the external gap
When customers don’t know what shipped, internal teams often don’t know either.
A VP of Engineering told me his company created a separate Slack channel just for “small stuff that support doesn’t know about.” Because support kept getting questions about features they’d never heard of.
At a fintech company, the CEO described how support teams discover changes “after the fact.” Teams produce updates but nobody consumes them. The communication arc breaks somewhere between engineering and the people who talk to customers.
If your own support team doesn’t know what you shipped, how would customers?
The compound effect
Feature awareness isn’t a one-time problem. It compounds.
Each feature you ship that customers don’t know about is:
- A missed retention opportunity
- A missed upsell conversation
- A missed competitive differentiation
- A missed proof point for your roadmap credibility
A product leader at a mid-market software company told me their customer success team now tracks development velocity specifically to show contract value to at-risk accounts. They use their changelog as a retention weapon. They recognized the alternative: customers not knowing what they’d built.
The compound effect works both ways. Consistent, discoverable communication builds trust over time. Inconsistent communication erodes it.
What a steady drumbeat looks like
The Sr. Product Marketing Manager who described the “I had no idea” problem also described what she wanted instead: a steady drumbeat of communication.
Not just launches. Not just big announcements. A consistent cadence where customers can expect to learn what’s new, even if they missed last month’s update.
This requires:
Persistence. Updates need to live somewhere customers can find them later. A changelog, a release notes page, an in-app feed. Something that doesn’t disappear after launch week.
Consistency. Monthly, bi-weekly, whatever cadence fits your velocity. The regularity matters as much as the content. Customers learn to expect and check for updates.
Easy to find. Updates need to be findable from many paths: email, in-app, search, help center. Customers come looking at different times through different doors.
Cumulative evidence. Over time, the archive of updates becomes proof of momentum. Prospects checking your product can see you’re alive and active.
Closing the gap
The feature awareness gap doesn’t close by trying harder at launches. It closes by building systems that continuously communicate what ships.
The teams that don’t have this problem share common traits: they’ve automated the capture of what changes, they publish consistently, and they make updates discoverable long after launch week ends.
One product marketer I spoke with said it perfectly: customers checking a competitor’s changelog and seeing regular updates will choose that competitor over one whose last update was months ago. “It doesn’t matter that you shipped more total value. The perception is that they’re more active.”
Perception becomes reality when customers make decisions based on what they see.
If customers keep saying “I had no idea this exists” even after you’ve announced features, let’s have a chat about how Changebot can help you maintain a steady drumbeat of discoverable, persistent updates.
