How Decoupling Notifications from Your Application’s Code Empowers Product Managers

New Blogpost by Anwesa Chatterjee

As a product manager, have you ever had to say no to improving your app’s notifications because of how complex the project seemed? If yes, you’re not alone. At Courier, we frequently see product teams deciding not to work on notifications. And PMs aren’t making that decision because a good notification experience is not important for their SaaS product or service — quite the opposite. The reason is that changing notifications, in their experience, requires a lot of work between engineering and product due to how closely the notifications are tied to the rest of the application. If PMs are tasked with adding a new email campaign that all new users of the app will receive, that can usually be done outside of the core app. But sending more unique notifications, like alerting a Slack channel when someone @-mentions their colleague in a shared file, can be complex and require significant engineering work. And still more work is needed when the text or the design of such a notification needs to be updated. We believe that changing notifications doesn’t have to be so difficult. In this article, we explain how decoupling notifications from your application’s codebase can help make notification projects less complex and less risky for product teams.