Watch The Kitchen Table Product Manager: Don’t Leave It at the Bottom of the School Bag!

Introduction

Sending isn’t the same as communicating

Anyone with school-age children will recognise the problem.

There’s an important letter from school. A trip needs paying for. A form needs signing. Something needs bringing in on Friday. And where is this vital piece of communication? At the bottom of the school bag. Technically, the school communicated it. The message was sent. It just never quite made it to the person who needed to act on it. Sound familiar?

Product teams need to focus what counts as communication

We spend enormous amounts of time communicating in product management. Release notes. Roadmaps. Product updates. Customer communications. Internal briefings. But sometimes we confuse putting information somewhere with actually communicating it.

“We told Sales.”

“It was in the release notes.”

“We put it on SharePoint.”

“It’s all on Confluence.”

All of those statements might be true.

But did the people who needed the information actually receive it, understand it and know what they needed to do next? That’s a very different question.

Don’t rely on the messenger

Schools sometimes have a particularly optimistic communications strategy: give the information to the child and hope it reaches home.

Product teams can fall into the same trap. We tell Sales or Client Services about a change and assume the message will somehow make its way to every customer who needs to hear it. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it ends up at the metaphorical bottom of the school bag.

Good product communication means thinking about the whole journey. Who needs to know? What do they need to understand? When do they need to hear it? And what is the best way to reach them?

One more portal probably isn’t the answer

Then there’s the other school favourite. “The information is on the app.”

Which app? “The school app.” The one for homework? Payments? Messages? Clubs? Lunches?

Product organisations have their own version. Confluence. SharePoint. Teams. Slack. Email. CRM. Release notes.

Making information available isn’t enough if people have to go hunting for it.

Communication is about the receiver

The measure of successful communication isn’t whether you sent something. It’s whether the other person received and understood it. That sounds obvious, but it’s easily forgotten when teams are busy getting a product or feature out of the door.

Great product teams think about communication as part of delivery, not something that happens afterwards. Because your work isn’t really finished when the release notes are uploaded to Confluence.

And it definitely isn’t finished if they’re still sitting at the bottom of someone’s school bag.

Watch Louise break this down and show how School Communications serve as a reminder of how we need to think harder about managing product communications too.