Getting Paid to Build Is Easy. Getting Credit for It? Hard.
Years ago, I worked at a dev firm that charged premium rates per hour per developer. We deployed in pairs, doubling our daily rate.
Clients had one reasonable question: “What exactly are we getting for all this money?”
We made a decision: every client got a weekly update. No exceptions. Every Friday, a summary of everything the team built that week landed in their inbox, ready for Monday morning.
This wasn’t about transparency for its own sake. When you’re billing enterprise rates, silence is dangerous. Silence lets clients fill the void with doubt.
Most companies don’t charge hundreds of dollars an hour. Most still have the same problem.
The Credit Gap
Here’s a pattern I see in nearly every product organization I talk to:
Engineering ships constantly. Customers think nothing is happening.
A VP of Product Marketing at an observability company described it this way: one of the most important reasons for churn is that customers don’t know what they have. They cancel for missing features that already exist. They leave for competitors who do the same things, just with better communication.
At a consumer fintech company, the CEO explained that their support team frequently discovers changes after the fact. The team produces updates, but the people who need the information most (the ones talking to customers daily) learn about features when customers complain.
A Director of Product at a workplace management company said CSMs constantly flag micro-details the product team missed communicating. After a major overhaul, customers care about every small change. The team can’t keep up.
The work is happening. The credit isn’t.
What Invisible Work Costs You
The business impact is real and measurable.
Churn. Customers leave for problems you’ve already solved. They just didn’t know. A VP of Product Marketing put it bluntly: “To me, one of the most important reasons for churn is like the customer just doesn’t know what we have done.”
Support load. When customers don’t know about fixes or improvements, they keep filing tickets. Your support team spends time on problems that no longer exist.
Billing friction. For consultancies and agencies, the question “what have you been doing?” is an indictment. Every hour of work that isn’t communicated is an hour the client questions.
Lost expansion. You can’t upsell features customers don’t know about. Product updates drive expansion, not just retention.
Internal misalignment. If your own sales team doesn’t know what shipped, they’re selling blind. If your marketing team doesn’t know, they’re positioning against stale information.
Why This Keeps Happening
The gap persists because communicating work is genuinely hard.
Writing good updates requires understanding both the technical change and the customer impact. That’s rare. Engineers know what they built. Product marketers know how to position it. The person who can do both often doesn’t exist, or doesn’t have time.
A product manager at a creator economy company described the challenge: “Engineering does way more than anyone sees. New features are just the tip of it.” The team has a process for announcing big features. Everything else (the improvements, the fixes, the optimizations) disappears into the void.
At an enterprise data management company planning a move to CI/CD, the documentation burden is the blocker. They can technically ship faster. They can’t communicate faster. The result? They don’t ship faster.
The faster you build, the harder this gets. Quarterly releases give you time to assemble a changelog. Continuous delivery means the communication debt compounds daily.
The Lesson
Back at the dev firm, those weekly updates did more than justify invoices. When the bill arrived, clients could point to the update and see exactly what they paid for. No surprises. No awkward conversations.
They built trust. Clients who see consistent progress trust the team. They extend contracts. They refer other clients.
They caught problems early. Sometimes writing the update revealed that we hadn’t actually delivered what we thought we had. The communication forcing function improved the work itself.
They created advocates. Clients who received regular updates talked about us differently. They could explain what we were doing. They became salespeople for our services.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because we treated communication as part of the engagement, not an afterthought.
Getting Credit You’ve Earned
The fix is simple in theory, hard in practice.
Capture context at the source. The best time to document why a change matters is during the build, not three weeks later when you’re assembling a recap.
Lower the activation energy. If writing updates requires a PM to reconstruct context from Jira tickets and interrogate engineers, it won’t happen consistently. Make the path of least resistance produce good communication.
Push to where people are. An update that lives in a wiki no one checks is worse than no update. Meet your audiences where they already work.
Make it sustainable. One great monthly update is nice. Fifty-two weekly updates that people can count on changes behavior.
The Uncomfortable Math
Consider this: if your team ships 100 improvements this year and customers know about 10 of them, are you capturing 100% of the value or 10%?
The work happened. Your team spent the engineering hours. They maintained the infrastructure. They deployed the code.
From the customer’s perspective, only the visible work exists.
You’re already doing the hard part. You’re building. The question is whether you’re getting credit for it, or leaving that credit on the table for competitors who communicate better.
If your team is building more than customers see, let’s chat about how Changebot helps you get credit for the work you’re already doing.
