The 100-Page Update Doc Nobody Reads
You know the document I’m talking about.
It’s the one that lands in everyone’s inbox two days before the big event. The quarterly business review. The sales kickoff. The partner summit. It’s got sections for every product, every team, every initiative. Screenshots. Bullet points. Version numbers. Roadmap slides.
It’s 100 pages long. And nobody reads it.
The ritual nobody questions
During a recent call with a product marketer at a large enterprise company, she described her update document process as “terrible.” Her exact words.
Every quarter, and especially before major events, she has to compile updates from across 20 different products. This means joining calls she wouldn’t otherwise need to attend, just to understand what shipped. Chasing down engineering leads. Translating technical changes into business value. Formatting everything into a consistent structure.
The result? A document so comprehensive that it becomes useless. Leadership skims the executive summary. Sales scrolls to find their specific product. Support doesn’t know it exists.
“And each time we just manually update it,” she told me. The same document, rebuilt from scratch, quarter after quarter.
Why we keep doing this
The 100-page update doc persists because it solves a real problem: nobody knows what shipped.
When teams work in silos (and they always do at scale), there’s no single source of truth for product changes. Engineering knows what they built. Product knows what they planned. Marketing knows what they announced. But nobody has the complete picture.
We create the document. We make it comprehensive because we’re terrified of leaving something out. We make it long because there’s genuinely a lot happening. We distribute it widely because everyone might need some piece of it.
And then we wonder why nobody reads it.
The hidden costs
The obvious cost is time. A Director of Product Marketing spending weeks assembling updates is a Director of Product Marketing not doing strategic work.
The subtler costs hurt more:
Staleness: By the time you compile, review, and distribute the document, some of the information is already outdated. That feature you called out? It got delayed. That bug fix? It shipped two weeks ago.
Fragmentation: The document becomes the canonical source, but it’s immediately forked. Sales pulls out their section and modifies it. Support creates their own summary. Now you have three or four versions of truth floating around.
Meeting multiplication: The document creates more meetings instead of replacing them. Now you need a meeting to walk through the document. And follow-up meetings to clarify specific sections. And prep meetings to prepare for those meetings.
Learned helplessness: When updates only come quarterly, people stop expecting updates. They develop workarounds. They message engineers directly. They ask in Slack channels. They’ve learned that the official channels don’t work.
What actually works
The solution is eliminating the need for the document entirely.
Here’s what that looks like:
Continuous visibility instead of periodic dumps: When stakeholders can see what shipped as it ships, they don’t need a quarterly catch-up. The 100-page document exists because the default state is ignorance. Change the default.
Audience-appropriate summaries: Your CEO doesn’t need the same update as your support team. Instead of one massive document for everyone, provide targeted summaries that respect people’s time and context.
Automated collection: The reason the document takes weeks to compile is that gathering updates is manual. Every conversation, every Slack message, every Jira query: it’s all human labor. Automate the collection, and the synthesis becomes manageable.
Living updates instead of static documents: A document is dead the moment it’s exported to PDF. A continuously updated feed stays current. People can check it when they need it, not when you decide to distribute it.
The meeting that changes
One thing I’ve noticed with teams that move to continuous product updates: the meetings don’t disappear, but they transform.
Instead of spending 45 minutes reading through what shipped, everyone shows up already informed. The meeting becomes a discussion of the two or three things that actually need debate. Strategy, not status. Decisions, not downloads.
A product marketer told me that her meetings used to be “lengthy calls to debate product value forever.” That’s what happens when people are learning information in real-time. Give them the information ahead of time, and suddenly the meeting has a different character entirely.
Start small
If you’re staring down your next 100-page document, you don’t have to boil the ocean.
Pick one product. Set up automated updates for that product alone. Let stakeholders experience what it’s like to have continuous visibility into what shipped.
Then do another product. And another.
Eventually, the quarterly document becomes a formality, a lightweight summary that points to the detailed, continuously-updated source of truth. Or it disappears entirely, and nobody misses it.
The goal is to make the 100-page document unnecessary.
If you’re spending weeks compiling update documents that nobody reads end-to-end, let’s have a chat about how Changebot can automate the collection and distribution of product updates so you can stop being a human aggregator and start doing strategic work.
