What to Do When Your Roadmap Is Full but Users Still Don’t Understand

“If users don’t know about a feature, the feature does not exist.” We could have framed this sentence after one of our recent customer interviews.

Over the past year, we have seen the same pattern repeated across mobile teams. Around 70% of the product and growth leaders we speak to describe a similar issue: users do not see or use important features inside the app. This is a recurring pattern, especially in complex products such as fintech, rather than an isolated case.

In one recent conversation with a banking team, users had asked in a survey to “add monitoring.” The team was genuinely surprised. Monitoring had been one of the first features ever launched in the app.

This was not about users being inattentive. It was about something simpler and more structural: A feature in the release does not automatically become a feature in the user’s mind.

We often overestimate interface clarity and underestimate how much explanation mature products require.

What the team did next — and why it matters — we’ll unpack in this article.

When the Roadmap Stops Solving the Problem

A product roadmap is built to answer one question: what should we build next? It is not designed to answer a different, equally important one: do users understand what already exists?

When teams say that users “don’t get the product,” it is rarely because the product lacks functionality. More often, the product has grown faster than users’ ability to make sense of it.

At this stage:

• Core features are already shipped
  
  
• New functionality adds incremental value, not clarity
  
  
• Changes require long lead times and multiple approvals
  
  
• The main screen is crowded or politically locked
  
  
• Every new release increases cognitive load instead of reducing it
  
  

The result is a gap between product capability and user understanding. This gap cannot be closed by adding more items to the backlog. In other words,the problem is that the roadmap is solving a different class of tasks.

Why This Gap Appears in Mature Products

As products mature, the problem shifts from building to operating complexity. Features no longer arrive in isolation. They depend on context, user state, prior actions, and rules that change over time. The product keeps moving forward, but user understanding does not scale at the same speed.

Studies by Nielsen Norman Group point out that as interfaces grow more powerful, users rely less on exploration and more on guidance to understand what to do next. At the same time, product teams continue to optimize roadmaps for delivery.

As a result, explanation becomes nobody’s explicit responsibility. That’s why teams in mature products often feel stuck. They are missing a way to operate understanding continuously, inside the product, without reopening the roadmap or redesigning the interface.

In-App Communication as a Separate Product Layer

According to studies referenced by Forrester and Gartner, a significant share of user friction in digital products comes not from missing features, but from users encountering functionality in moments they were not prepared for.

This creates a distinct class of work that neither the roadmap nor marketing owns.

➡️ Roadmaps optimize for what changes.
➡️ Marketing optimizes for what is announced.
➡️ But understanding depends on when and where meaning is delivered inside the product.

This is where a separate product layer comes in handy. A communication layer is about operating understanding as an ongoing process. This includes deciding which messages appear, to whom, in what context, and under which constraints, without reopening the backlog or changing navigation.

⚡ You may remember the banking team we mentioned earlier. After realizing that “monitoring” technically existed but functionally did not exist in users’ mental model, they changed their approach.

1️⃣ First, “What’s new” stories became a permanent operational element. Not in the generic format of “We’ve updated the app,” but in a practical one: where the button is located, what to tap, and what the user gains as a result.

2️⃣ Second, education stopped being a single-format effort. A story with a poll delivered a CTR of around 10–11%, which is already a healthy number in many fintech contexts. But when the team introduced a contextual bottom sheet inside the relevant flow, inviting users to open that story, the reach increased to roughly 50%.

The shift was not about one format outperforming another. It was about designing a sequence: In-app trigger → Story explanation → User action.

What This Means for Product Teams

1️⃣ First, control over understanding moves closer to operations. Clarity can no longer depend on releases, redesigns, or long planning cycles. Teams need a way to influence how users perceive, interpret, and act on existing functionality in real time. Without this, even well-built features remain fragile.

2️⃣ Second, responsibility becomes shared. Understanding is no longer owned solely by product, marketing, or support. It becomes a cross-functional concern that sits between them. 

3️⃣ Third, progress is measured differently. Teams start paying attention to whether users reach the intended actions, whether support questions repeat, and whether core functionality is actually used as designed.

4️⃣ Finally, speed stops being about development velocity. The ability to clarify, adjust, and guide users without touching the roadmap becomes a form of strategic flexibility. It allows teams to respond to misalignment early, before it turns into churn, support load, or costly rework.

At this stage, the question product teams ask is no longer what should we build next? It becomes how do we continuously operate understanding inside the product, without slowing everything else down?

InAppStory fits into this picture as a system teams hire to execute that job consistently. Use it when you need to:

• explain existing functionality without reopening design or development cycles
  
  
• guide users through complex flows at the moment decisions are made
  
  
• confirm progress and reduce uncertainty during critical actions
  
  
• test changes and messages on real users without committing to releases

Over time, better in-app communication translates into measurable outcomes teams already care about: higher DAU/MAU, stronger feature adoption, improved LTV and AOV, better ROMI of in-app initiatives, and lower support pressure reflected in contact rate and time-to-resolution.

Can we share how teams like yours use in-app formats to move key metrics? 30 minutes to understand how in-app communication works in practice. We’ll show real examples from products similar to yours and answer your questions:

SCHEDULE A CALL WITH US

Sources

1. Nielsen Norman Group, UX Strategies for Complex-Application Design.
2. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial.
3. Hazliza Haron, Azalia Abd Rahman, Afiza Hajemi, Digital Touchpoints and their Influence on Customer Preference for B2B Marketing.