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I’m a lifecycle marketer. Part of my job is in-app messaging and onboarding, but I don’t actually control everything that shows up for customers.
Different teams can launch messages on their own. Product puts up modals. Marketing adds campaign stuff. CS asks for one-off messages to support specific accounts. Usually it’s last minute and framed as “this will only be up for a bit.”
Individually, none of it is unreasonable necessarily. Taken together, it’s a mess. Messages overlap. Things contradict each other. Customers get nudged in too many directions at once.
We don’t really have governance. There’s no shared agreement on what should go in-app, no consistent review step, and no clear way to slow something down without sounding difficult. When something breaks or confuses people, I’m usually the one fixing it afterward, even if I wasn’t involved in the decision.I know we don’t need a big process or a bunch of approvals. That wouldn’t fly anyway. But right now it feels like the opposite extreme, and it’s not working.
I’m not trying to own everything. I just want some structure so this doesn’t keep happening. What’s the smallest governance setup that actually works?
— Basically the Janitor
First of all, so sorry you’re stuck cleaning up. If I were a kid at the school you were cleaning, I’d spend my lunch breaks annoying you.
Now, you’re asking the right question. And that wording matters more than you might think.
When people talk about governance, they usually imagine a big, heavy thing: a so-long-no-one-reads-it doc, a process, a set of rules that magically fixes everything. That’s part of why it feels so overwhelming and why teams resist it. Governance sounds like more work before it sounds like less chaos.
The mistake most teams make is trying to design “good governance” all at once. The teams that make progress start much smaller.
The smallest governance framework that actually works isn’t a perfect system — it’s a minimum set of shared agreements that everyone commits to, plus a way to keep those agreements alive over time.
At a baseline, there are a few things that need to be true.
First, you need a clear purpose for the tool itself. What is in-app messaging for at your company? Where does it fit alongside product UI, email, marketing, support outreach, and sales communication? If that isn’t explicitly agreed on, every team will keep treating it as a catch-all (or worse, an afterthought) and you’ll keep playing cleanup.
Second, you need a clearly defined core group and ownership model. That doesn’t mean everything has to funnel through one person (that just creates a bottleneck), but it does mean everyone understands who’s responsible, who’s accountable, and who needs to be consulted before something ships. Pick whatever ownership framework works for you — RACI, DRI, etc. — but make it explicit. Make sure everyone agrees on their role.
Third, you need shared creation and QA principles. Not a long checklist, just a few non-negotiables. For example:
Fourth, you need prioritization and targeting guardrails. One of the biggest sources of conflict in lifecycle work is that everyone has something they want customers to see. A simple tiering system — similar to how product teams tier launches — helps you decide what takes precedence, how much lead time is required, and how much scrutiny something gets. This is also where rules like “don’t target all users by default” become incredibly powerful.
Finally, you need lightweight communication norms. Where do these guidelines live? How are updates shared? How often does the core group step back and review what’s live, what’s overlapping, and what should be archived? Governance only works if it’s treated as something you do, not something you wrote once and forgot about.
None of this requires a massive process overhaul. And none of it needs to be perfect on day one. The goal isn’t to control everything, and it sounds like that’s not what you want anyway. These pieces of governance are the foundational bits on which you build the rest of the program, important guidelines, helpful training for different teams, and more.
Ultimately, your aim is to turn it from governance, a thing that instantly becomes stale and wasted hours for the person doing the cat herding or cleaning, into governing, the embedded ways of working that keep the core purpose of the platform and its role in your customer strategy at the forefront instead of process for process’ sake!
We want to reduce the things that cause the most customer confusion and internal friction first.
Start with organizing principles and ways of working. Get agreement there. Then build from that as you learn.
Governance doesn’t have to arrive fully formed. It just has to start.
— Experience Etiquette’s Elana
