Not everyone who builds products writes code — and that’s a good thing.
In every team I’ve worked with, there’s this moment when developers are buried in pull requests, designers are pushing Figma updates, and somewhere in the middle, someone has to explain all of it.
That person is often not a developer. It might be a product manager, marketer, support lead, or even a founder. And yet, that’s the person who decides whether customers understand what’s changing — or get confused and leave.
Communicating product changes is as critical as building them.
Why communicating changes matters as much as shipping them
You can build the best update in the world, but if users don’t understand what changed, why it matters, or how it affects them, it might as well not exist.
That’s where communication comes in — bridging the gap between technical progress and user experience.
Good communication does three things:
- Translates complexity into clarity — users shouldn’t need to read patch notes.
- Connects updates to user value — focus on outcomes, not features.
- Builds trust — every clear, timely update strengthens confidence in your product.
And you can do all that without touching a single line of code.
Start by understanding the change
Before you communicate, understand what really changed. Not just the feature, but the reason behind it.
Let’s say your dev team has just updated your payment processing infrastructure — migrating from one provider to a multi-processor system.
If you tell users,
“We’ve upgraded our payment backend for better reliability.”
...that’s technically true, but it’s also meaningless to most people.
Instead, reframe it around impact:
“You’ll now experience faster, more reliable checkouts — especially if you’re paying from outside the U.S. We’ve added more payment options to make global transactions smoother.”
See the difference? Same change. Zero code. Clearer story.
Speak in benefits, not features
A developer might say, “We added PSP orchestration.”
A communicator should say, “Payments now work seamlessly in 135+ currencies and 100+ methods — from cards to crypto.”
That one sentence can make the difference between user confusion and user excitement.
When Whop rolled out its multi-PSP payment infrastructure, for example, it wasn’t just a technical milestone — it was a reliability and reach upgrade. Customers didn’t need to know about routing logic or failover handling. They just needed to know: their payments won’t fail anymore.
Your role is to find that user-facing takeaway and amplify it.
Choose the right format for the message
Different updates deserve different formats. For example:
- Small UX tweaks - Changelog or in-app banner
- Functional updates - Short blog post or email digest
- Major features - Blog article, demo video, or product page update
- Infrastructure improvements - Brief announcement emphasizing reliability/performance
The rule: match effort to impact.
You don’t need to publish a 2,000-word blog post every time a developer fixes a bug — but if your backend team just rebuilt your payments stack, it deserves a thoughtful explanation that reassures and excites users.
Partner with your developers (don’t translate in isolation)
You don’t need to code to understand — you just need to ask the right questions.
- What specific problem did this update solve?
- What does the change enable users to do that they couldn’t before?
- What’s the “invisible magic” that users will feel, even if they don’t see it?
Developers appreciate communicators who get it right. A short sync or Slack message with these questions can save hours of miscommunication later.
Make communication part of your product flow
The best teams don’t treat communication as an afterthought. They make it part of the release process.
Before every launch, decide:
- Who needs to know? (customers, partners, internal teams)
- What do they need to know? (benefits, risks, timing)
- How should we tell them? (email, in-app, docs, social, or all three)
If you plan your communication like a feature — with ownership, milestones, and iteration — it becomes just as valuable as the release itself.
You don’t have to touch a line of code to contribute meaningfully to product development.
Every product change tells a story — your job is to make sure people hear it clearly.
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