From Blasting Everyone to Reaching the Right Engineers
Hundreds of product managers were sending launch emails to internal developers with no clear picture of who they were writing to or what those people needed to get done. Some blasted every engineer regardless of relevance. The result was noise: low engagement, eroding trust and no shared language for talking about the tools.
The challenge
Help product managers stop announcing features and start speaking to the jobs developers were trying to do, and give the organization the governance to send the right message to the right people at scale.
What I did
- Built a persona library. It covered employee types, the tools they relied on most and docs-site traffic by segment, giving PMs facts instead of guesses.
- Mapped content to people. With the docs team I pulled usage reports showing what information each group was actually looking for.
- Showed the whole toolchain. Flowcharts, product diagrams, launch tiering and a launch calendar helped teams position their product within the bigger picture, not in isolation.
- Set the standard. Email training established tone and how to write for a specific persona, and open-source libraries and content standards let it scale beyond one team.
- Built governance with engineering and compliance. User interviews found where sends went wrong. Then came an intake form and approval workflow, a success kit so teams could self-serve, and usage guidelines.
- Made quality checkable. I helped roll out an MCP-based tool that checks a draft’s tone and clarity against our best-performing past campaigns before it’s scheduled.
What changed
Email open rates rose, click-throughs and time on page grew, and adoption of the products we tracked improved. The governance model supported teams across the company and millions of targeted emails, and the organization brought in more AI-assisted support to build on the foundation.
What I took away
Most “communication problems” are audience problems. Know who you’re talking to, and the writing gets easier.