I use a great service called Headway to keep Preceden users informed about updates to the product.

Headway provides a widget I have installed on Preceden to let users know when there have been updates With it, users will see a bell with a count of unread items (which Headway keeps track of in local storage):

That bell, when clicked, expands into a list of updates:

And those snippets expand into longer posts:

I’m pretty good about sharing big product updates with users on Headway, but recently 90% of my day to day work is making small, incremental improvements to the site, or things that are not very interesting to users like marketing projects.

This causes a perception problem though, because often times weeks go by when users don’t see me sharing any updates, and they can interpret that to mean we’re not working. Especially when you combine that with inactivity on a public list of user requested features like Preceden has (most of which are low priority for me), and it’s easy to imagine Preceden is in maintenance mode.

A customer wrote in recently asking about this:

Hi, we’re a large organisation using Preceden and are considering shifting all activities away from the tool due to the slow pace of continuous improvement.

I’m interested to understand – is the tool still being improved, or is it just business as usual support now?

The publicly visible roadmap shows no work in progress.

I thanked the customer for the feedback and explained the situation and he was very understanding. We also jumped on a call and I got a lot of great suggestions from him and his team. But it was a wake-up call that I needed to do better about communicating what we’re working on, even if it’s not user-facing feature work. And also to ensure I’m rolling out a steady stream of product improvements, and not focusing on backend and marketing type work for long periods of time (which is funny, because for years I did focus almost entirely on product work, almost certainly too much).

A quick aside: I previously sent out monthly email updates to customers detailing the product improvements we shipped that month, but as my focus has shifted away from mainly feature work and more to the other type of work required to run and grow a SaaS business, the frequency and number of big feature updates I could share declined, making those monthly email updates harder to write, and I eventually abandoned it. Might be something to revisit down the road though.

Anyway, to address the immediate problem, going forward on the last weekday of each month I’m going to share an update listing the smaller projects we worked on that month. It doesn’t take much time to write, and I imagine a lot of users will find it interesting, even if the updates don’t necessarilly impact their usage of Preceden.

Here’s the first one that lists what we worked on in September:

Probably should have been doing this all along. Lesson learned.