The Support Team's Secret Channel: When Your Own Team Doesn't Know What Shipped

During a recent product demo, a VP of Engineering mentioned something that stopped me cold.

“We actually created a whole channel just for small stuff that support doesn’t know about,” he said. “Because we would only publish the big stuff.”

Let that sink in, a team had to create a separate communication channel just to learn about changes their own company made. Not external changes. Not third-party integrations. Their own product updates.

This isn’t unusual. I hear variations of this story at almost every company I talk to.

The Pattern

Here’s how it typically unfolds:

Engineering ships a small bug fix or minor improvement
It’s not “big enough” for the official release notes
No one tells support
A customer contacts support about it
Support has no idea what they’re talking about
Support scrambles to find someone who knows
The customer waits while support investigates their own product
Eventually someone figures it out
Repeat dozens of times per month

After enough cycles, someone in support gets frustrated enough to create a workaround: a Slack channel, a shared doc, a weekly email, something to capture the “small stuff” that falls through the cracks.

The workaround helps. But it shouldn’t be necessary.

Why Small Releases Matter to Support

Big releases get attention. They have launch dates, documentation, training sessions. Everyone knows about them.

Small releases are different. They ship quietly. A bug fix here, a UX tweak there, a performance improvement that makes something 20% faster. Individually, none of them seems worth announcing.

From support’s perspective, though, these small releases matter enormously:

They close open tickets. A customer reported a bug. Engineering fixed it. But support doesn’t know, so they keep working around the issue instead of closing the ticket.

They prevent unnecessary escalations. Without knowing a fix shipped, support escalates issues that are already resolved, wasting everyone’s time.

They affect troubleshooting. When support doesn’t know what changed, they can’t distinguish between “this is a new bug” and “this behavior comes from the recent update.”

They impact customer perception. Telling a customer “I’ll check with engineering” five times in a week makes the company look disorganized. Support should know.

The Downstream Cascade

A CEO at a fintech company described how support learns about fixes late, slowing triage. The problem isn’t just support’s, it cascades everywhere:

Customers wait longer. Resolution times increase when support has to investigate internally before helping.

Ticket volume increases. The same issue gets reported again and again because support isn’t proactively closing related tickets.

Trust erodes. Customers start to wonder: if your own support team doesn’t know your product, how good can it be?

Knowledge silos deepen. Workaround channels create yet another place information might live, making it harder to find later.

Why This Keeps Happening

The root cause is a mismatch between what seems worth announcing and what support actually needs to know.

Product and engineering make announcements based on significance: Is this a major feature? A breaking change? Something marketing should know about?

Support needs information based on relevance: Will customers ask about this? Does this affect open tickets? Could this cause confusion?

These are different filters. A database index improvement (high significance, low relevance) might get announced. A small bug fix (low significance, high relevance) might not.

The Communication Tax

Organizations that recognize this problem often try to solve it with process:

“Before you close a ticket, check the release notes”
“Engineering should tag support-relevant PRs”
“Product should review every fix with support”

Each of these adds overhead. Each creates friction. Each depends on someone remembering to do something.

A Product Operations lead at a major tech company described it: “There’s no relationship with what was actually put into a PR and documentation.” The system for shipping code and the system for communicating about code operate independently.

Process bridges can’t fully close that gap. They require constant maintenance and perfect execution. Something always slips through.

What Support Actually Needs

When I ask support leaders what would help, the answers are consistent:

Timely. They need to know within hours, not days. By the time a weekly summary arrives, they’ve already handled tickets without the information.

Complete. They need all changes, not just the “significant” ones. Support doesn’t get to choose which issues customers will ask about.

Contextual. They need to understand impact, not implementation. “Fixed null pointer in auth handler” doesn’t help. “Login issues for users with special characters in passwords are now resolved” does.

Searchable. When a customer describes a symptom, support should be able to search and find if a relevant change shipped.

Automatic. It shouldn’t depend on someone remembering to notify them. The information should flow as a byproduct of shipping.

The Real Problem: Internal Communication First

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your support team doesn’t know what shipped, your customers definitely don’t.

Support is the canary in the coal mine. When internal communication fails, external communication fails too. Fix internal first, and external gets easier.

This is why I recommend starting any product communication effort by asking: Does your own team know what you’re shipping? If the answer is no (or “only the big stuff”), start there.

Building the Flow

Teams that solve this share a few characteristics:

They treat internal updates as important. Not a nice-to-have, but a shipping prerequisite.

They automate what they can. The information comes from the source (the code, the PR, the deployment) rather than manual entry.

They push, don’t pull. Information goes to support automatically, rather than support having to hunt for it.

They right-size the detail. Support gets what support needs, not a copy of the engineering changelog.

They close the loop. When something ships that affects tickets, there’s a path from “we deployed the fix” to “close these tickets.”

The Secret Channel Test

Here’s a diagnostic: Does your support team have a secret channel, shadow doc, or informal system for tracking “stuff engineering shipped that we didn’t hear about”?

If yes, you have an internal communication problem. The workaround is a symptom, not a solution.

The goal is a world where support never has to say “let me check with engineering” about whether something shipped. They should know before the customer asks.

That’s not a technology problem. It’s a flow problem. And it’s solvable.

If your support team is constantly surprised by what shipped, let’s chat about how Changebot routes updates to the people who need them.