Writing the Update Is Only Half the Battle

Brian Sierakowski - Founder

A Head of Engineering Processes at an AI consultancy put it bluntly during a recent call: “Distribution is a pain. Writing the update is one thing, getting it to clients in the right channel is another.”

He wasn’t wrong. His team had the discipline to document their work. They understood the value of keeping clients informed. The problem wasn’t creating the content. The problem was getting it from his team’s notes to his clients’ inboxes.

This is a pattern I see constantly. Teams solve the creation problem and assume they’ve solved communication. They haven’t.

The Creation Fallacy

Here’s what typically happens:

  1. Someone writes a solid product update
  2. They post it somewhere: Slack, a wiki, maybe a changelog
  3. They check the box: “communication done”
  4. Half the people who needed that information never see it

The update exists. The communication didn’t happen.

A VP of Product Marketing at an observability company described her team’s situation: they have a changelog. Updates get posted. Yet there’s a “backlog of unmessaged releases,” features that shipped, got documented somewhere, and never reached the audiences who needed to know.

At a consumer fintech company, the CEO told me their weekly product updates and monthly support recaps aren’t consistently read. The team produces the information. Customers just don’t consume it.

Why Distribution Is Harder Than Writing

Writing is a single act. Distribution is a systems problem.

Consider what “getting the update out” actually requires:

Different audiences with different needs. Your engineering team needs technical detail. Your support team needs customer-facing implications. Your marketing team needs positioning angles. Your customers need benefits. One update doesn’t fit all.

Different channels with different formats. Slack wants short and punchy. Your blog wants longer and richer. Email needs a subject line hook. In-app notifications need to be scannable. Each destination has its own requirements.

Timing considerations. Does support know before the feature goes live? Does marketing have time to prepare? Are customers learning about it from your announcement or from stumbling into the change?

Consistency over time. A single well-distributed update is nice. A reliable cadence of well-distributed updates builds trust. Most teams can do the former occasionally. Almost none can do the latter consistently.

One engineering leader planning a move to continuous delivery described documentation overhead as the primary blocker. The team can ship faster technically. They can’t communicate faster.

The Consultancy Problem

This gets even harder when your audience is external clients, not just internal teams.

A head of an engineering consultancy explained their challenge: “We need to be constantly updating our clients on what we’re doing.” Different clients have different repo setups. Some work happens in client repositories, some in internal ones. The engagement structure fragments communication paths by design.

For consultancies and agencies, distribution goes beyond channels to relationships. Each client expects updates tailored to their engagement. A generic “here’s what we shipped” blast doesn’t work when you’re billing hourly and clients want to see exactly what their investment produced.

The Slack Trap

Many teams think they’ve solved distribution because updates go to Slack.

Slack is not distribution. Slack is one channel that everyone already uses for everything else. Updates compete with every other message for attention. They scroll away within hours. People who aren’t in the right channel never see them. People who are in the channel might be in a meeting when it posts.

A product manager at a creator economy company described their current state: new features get posted in Slack and tracked in Notion. The system technically works. But “engineering does way more than anyone sees.” The visibility problem persists despite the process existing.

Slack is fine as one destination among many. As the only destination, it guarantees information loss.

What Distribution Actually Looks Like

Teams that solve distribution treat it as infrastructure, not afterthought.

They push to where people already work. If marketing lives in one tool and support lives in another, updates flow to both. Information comes to the person, not the other way around.

They match format to channel. The Slack version is a brief summary with a link. The changelog has more detail. The customer email leads with benefits. Same underlying information, different packaging.

They maintain a canonical source. Somewhere, the full version exists. Everything else points back to it. When the update needs correction, one edit propagates everywhere.

They automate the repetitive parts. Manual distribution doesn’t scale. When publishing requires opening six tools and reformatting the same content six times, it won’t happen consistently.

The Real Metric

Here’s a useful test: pick a feature that shipped last month. Ask three people from different teams what it does and why it matters.

If you get three confident, consistent answers, your distribution is working.

If you get confusion, vague recollection, or “I think I saw something about that,” you have a creation problem masquerading as complete.

Writing the update is necessary, but not enough. The work isn’t done until the information reaches the people who need it, in a format they can use, through a channel they actually check.

If distribution is your bottleneck (updates get written but don’t reach the right people), let’s chat about how Changebot automates both the creation and distribution of product updates.