There's a version of this story that a lot of software companies know well: too many emails, too many in-app messages, too many teams talking to customers with no coordination. The result? Customers start ignoring everything. It comes down to a problem of trust.

We had that problem. Now we don't.

At Pendo, we use our own products — Pendo Guides and Orchestrate — to manage every in-app communication we send to our customers. It genuinely changed how we operate.

The problem with decentralized communication

Before we centralized governance, any product manager or team could spin up a guide, write an email, and push it out. They used guides for all sorts of reasons: to inform customers, create urgency around adoption, drive engagement, and for many other purposes. But the execution created problems.

Customers complained about too many guides, and too many emails. The experience felt fragmented, like they were hearing from five different companies with the same logo. Every team was optimizing for their own message, and nobody owned the full picture.

Driving governance through the app itself

The fix Pendo arrived at was structural. We created a single queue. A dedicated person owns it. When a team wants to communicate something to customers — a product launch, a service disruption, a behavioral nudge — that request comes into the queue first.

Then a conversation happens: Does this actually need a Pendo Guide? Does it need an email through Orchestrate? Both? Neither? That question, asked deliberately every single time, is the whole thing. It's where governance lives.

What the issue comes down to is: everyone wants to communicate but doesn't always know the best way to do that for a given context. We found that helping people identify what a user should be doing after viewing a communication helps answer the question of how to best engage with them, whether it’s via a guide or an email.

One voice, one standard for comms

The output of that process is communication that looks and sounds like Pendo. Every Pendo Guide that goes out is branded, consistent, and strategically timed. When customers see an announcement or a product update, it's coherent with everything else they've experienced from us.

This matters more than it sounds. In aggregate, fragmented communication erodes confidence in a product. Coherent communication builds it. Customers start to trust that when we have something to say, it's worth hearing.

Increasing speed without increasing chaos

One of the things we're proudest of is the combination of speed and quality the model enables. When something breaks, we can target affected customers inside the app without waiting for an email campaign to get approved or a status page someone may or may not check.

When the product team at Pendo is about to ship something significant, we coordinate the launch communication through Orchestrate: the right segments get the right message at the right time, across both in-app guides and email, in the right sequence. That speed used to come at the cost of quality. Now it doesn't, because the process is there.

The signal that tells us it’s working

We used to hear complaints about too many guides and too many emails. We don't hear that anymore.

What the change comes down to is we communicate more intentionally than we used to. But customers aren't fatigued by it, because we're not overwhelming them. They're coming to us as a single source for what's happening with the product, and they're getting it clearly.

What this looks like for your team

If you're a Pendo customer thinking about how to structure your own in-app communication governance, the principles we operate from translate directly:

Centralize the queue. Someone owns the decision of what goes out and when. Nothing goes out without going through a judgment call.

Let the format follow the moment. Every request should answer: does this need a Pendo Guide? An Orchestrate sequence? A targeted email? The channel should match the context, not default to whatever's easiest to create.

Standardize the experience. Your customers should feel like they're hearing from one coherent company, not different teams with different aesthetics and different levels of urgency.

Let the data drive it. When you can see what's getting engagement and what's being dismissed, the decisions get easier. You start building an instinct for what customers actually want to hear and when.

We believe that how you communicate with customers inside your product is itself a product decision. It shapes how people feel about the software, how they understand it, and whether they trust you when something goes wrong or something exciting is coming. We built Pendo Guides and Orchestrate to help companies do this well. We hold ourselves to the same standard.