How do you handle messaging changes when your product features are quickly evolving?

The best way to handle products that are ever changing is to build a solution centric narrative. 

If you build your narrative around solutions or customer-centric needs, then this shouldn’t change with a few feature add-ons. Customer needs tend to change less often than product features. Think of features as pillars or building blocks to support your narrative. A strong, well researched and tested narrative will not collapse if you need to replace one feature with a newer one.

A good way to think of your narrative is to imagine a house. The foundation of your house is the platform or product. On top of the foundation there are pillars that will hold the infrastructure together, these are your product features, not visible externally but very important to hold your story together. The roof that sits on top of those pillars can be considered your solutions, meaning, and the benefits that your features will add. All of these elements (foundation, pillars and roof) are normally built by engineers.

Your job as a product marketer is to design the house, plan how all the elements will connect in harmony and how the house will be perceived by the external audience. The Product Marketer is the architect of the house. And a good architect will design a house in such a way that if one pillar falls or needs to be replaced, the house will still maintain its function and design. If you architect your narrative with your audience in mind (instead of the product), adding a new feature should enhance it; not change it.

I truly believe messaging should be a living, breathing thing that gets updated periodically. How often though can be challenging. It's often not feasible to update it at every product launch or, if decision making takes a long time, it can be tedious to update frequently. This is where I think aligning on year or multi-year positioning that reflects the future state of the product roadmap can be helpful. Then, you can think of messaging as evolving in several steps until you realize that ultimate value. If your positioning anchors to where the roadmap is going, then you can decide in advance at what point you've delivered enough of the value to update the messaging.

First I'll say that once you've achieved product-market fit, the core positioning and messaging shouldn't be wildly dynamic. Creating meaning in the market demands repetition and credibility over time. 

To know whether a product or new capability warrants a change the messaging, I'd consider whether it's a fundamentally new value, or whether it adds to existing value. For example feature X might be really powerful for benefit Y, but if benefit Y has been a long-standing pillar of your messaging, you simply treat it as a new proof point vs. changing the messaging. 

In terms of tactically how to keep product feature/capabilities up-to-date, working closely with the product team to know what is coming down the pike and the impact of each ship allows you to plan for cross-channel updates you want to make. Things like docs are a no-brainer, but it's important to think through what warrants updating website videos or feature highlights. A couple of considerations: 

1. How much potential does the new or evolved feature have to drive pipeline or improve conversion? 
2. How much risk does the new or evolved feature pose in terms of creating confusion or disappointment for a person who goes from marketing content to product trial? 

As a product marketer you're always going to have more on your to-do list than is possible, so making sure you are strategic about investments of time (even if it's a "quick" website update) is important—meeting your goals is hard in the face of a thousand "quick" paper cuts!