The Non-Technical Founder's Update Problem
I’m in a seat a lot of founders know well. I’m not the one writing the code.
My cofounder builds. I do everything else. Marketing, sales, customer conversations, positioning, strategy. And somewhere amid that, I’m supposed to tell customers what we shipped.
The problem is… I don’t always know what we shipped!
Not because my cofounder isn’t doing the work. He’s shipping constantly. But translating “what changed in the codebase” into “what customers should know” requires a conversation. Every time. And every conversation is an interrupt.
The interrupt tax
Here’s the workflow when a non-technical founder wants to communicate a product update:
- Notice that something shipped (maybe from a Slack notification, maybe from a passing comment)
- Ask the engineer to explain what changed
- Wait for the engineer to context-switch out of whatever they’re building
- Listen to a technical explanation
- Ask clarifying questions (“But what does that mean for the user?”)
- Translate the explanation into customer-friendly language
- Write the update
- Distribute it
Each step is a friction point. Steps 2-5 are an interrupt that the engineer resents, even if they don’t say so. And this process repeats for every single change worth communicating.
The rational response? Skip it. Ship silently… and tell yourself you’ll batch the updates later.
(We all know how “later” works in a startup.)
The knowledge asymmetry
A founder recently described this gap perfectly. He’s watched other founders send weekly updates about everything, even bugs, and seen customers love it.
He’s the marketing half of the founding team. Every piece of product communication requires pulling information out of engineering, and that “pull” has a cost.
This is what someone fancy might call a “structural asymmetry,” the person with the context (what changed and why) isn’t the person in front of the audience (customers, prospects, investors).
And, the bridge between them is a conversation that both sides find inconvenient.
At one startup I spoke with the CEO told me he didn’t have a clear view of everything engineering was building. Features would ship and he’d learn about them later. His team tracked things in Notion and Slack, but there was no structured way for the non-technical team to see what went out the door.
At another, a non-technical cofounder needed to communicate progress to investors and customers but couldn’t parse engineering’s release notes. The work went uncredited because the translation step never happened.
The marketing founder’s dilemma
If you’re a non-technical founder with marketing skills, you’re in an odd position. You know exactly how to position updates. You know the voice. You know the audience. You can write compelling copy.
You just don’t have the raw material.
The information lives in pull requests, commit messages, and Jira tickets that engineers wrote for other engineers. Reading them requires technical context you may not have. And asking your cofounder to translate every PR description into plain English is a tax neither of you can afford to pay consistently.
One founder told me he could probably never need to hire a product marketing person if he could just get structured, understandable summaries of what engineering shipped. He has the marketing acumen. He has the distribution channels. He has the voice. He’s just missing the input.
The irony is that the information exists. It’s in the code changes, the ticket descriptions, the branch names. It’s just locked in a format that only engineers can read.
The compounding silence
This problem doesn’t stay small.
In the early days of a startup, the founders sit next to each other (literally or on Slack). Communication is ambient. You absorb what’s happening. Updates flow naturally.
As the team grows, even slightly, that ambient awareness breaks down. The non-technical founder starts needing formal mechanisms to learn what shipped. Meetings. standups. “What did you work on this week?” conversations.
Each mechanism adds overhead. Each overhead makes communication feel harder. And the gap between what ships and what customers learn about grows wider.
At one company, the business side described shipping a “truckload” of work that was never communicated externally. The engineering team built it. The business team didn’t know how to talk about it. Customers had no idea.
Closing the gap without more interrupts
The answer isn’t “schedule more syncs between engineering and marketing.” That adds more of the thing that’s already too expensive.
The answer is removing the human translation layer from the critical path. The information about what changed and why exists in the tools engineering already uses. Pull requests describe changes. Tickets describe intent. Commits describe implementation.
If that information can be automatically summarized in language a non-technical founder can read, review, and publish, the interrupt disappears. Engineering keeps building. The founder keeps communicating. Neither has to stop what they’re doing to serve the other’s workflow.
The best version of this looks like opening a dashboard and seeing: “Here’s what your team shipped this week, in plain English, ready for you to review and send to customers.” No meetings. No interrupts. No decoding commit messages.
If you’re the non-technical half of a founding team and product updates keep falling through the cracks, let’s have a chat about how Changebot bridges the gap between what engineering ships and what customers see.
