You can create a workspace around a team, department, large project, client, partner, etc. Add the details of your company’s registered name, and the official name of the product. The reader should clearly know which product is being updated in the release. It’s an important way of understanding the current state of a platform, see past updates and release versions. You can create an in-app widget to add to your public-facing website as well as your web-based application. If your audience isn’t technical, you should make sure that you describe the meaning and importance of any technical language included in your release note.

Thunderbird is an open source project, which means anyone can contribute ideas, designs, code, and time helping fellow users. Once I’ve explained all the criteria, we’ll have the release notes best practices we imagined. Building a team is crucial for delivery and daily operations in any organization, but release note meaning it’s imperative in product management. For example, you could add a small section with the latest updates on your customer support portal. Do you plan to release a game-changing update redefining the value of your product? Writing release notes is one thing, but distributing them is a different story.

Company

(This is probably why they’re boring.) By writing these notes, product teams aim to inform users and increase their engagement with the product itself. While most businesses treat release notes as an afterthought, this is an excellent way to keep customers informed about new features and updates and drive product adoption. Given how little effort and time it takes to write great release notes, they should be a part of every product release you launch. Intercom is a great example of a company that puts massive effort into its release notes. Each of them is formatted as a blog post, with detailed descriptions of new features and fixes.

At Frill, our target audience is product managers and developers with a high level of knowledge of software building. Even still, we do our best to keep our release notes simple and non-technical. For example, we can just put “SSO” in a release note, without having to explain what SSO is or what it’s used for. Release notes are digital documents providing information about updates, fixes, and new features in a SaaS product.

Why Are They Important in Product Management?

Also, preparing them might feel like a burden, they’re actually pretty simple. It briefly talks about what the clients should expect from the new versions, or more specifically, when they should expect it. Even though the white space is less than desired, I can clearly pick out the future releases and the functions that I’m looking for.

Microsoft breaks the release notes down into categories such as Resolved Issues and Feature Updates. Within those categories, there are subcategories for individual office components, such as Word and Excel. Microsoft has style guides that include advice on everything from the terminology to describe specific user interface elements to general word choice and tone of voice.

Their official goal is to inform users about recent changes and the content of the patches/updates. Well-thought external release notes can help you become more memorable for users. Internal release notes make potential troubleshooting and dependencies easy to fix.

By making critical information more accessible, reducing meetings, and consolidating communications, you can make your product design process smoother. Release notes, although often neglected, present you with an opportunity to wow your users and strengthen your brand communication. A dedicated page containing all information about releases is a good way to organize and showcase all your hard work. These have pretty high discoverability and are among the best ways to ensure users don’t miss a critical update. One of the ways is to send users a push notification or some sort of in-app messages, such as a pop-up banner. First and foremost, even minor bug fixes might be presented in an interesting way.

• When developers write release notes for Microsoft, they’ll follow this guidance so that Office, Visual Studio, and other products all have the same “feel” and presentation.
• The template integrates with monday.com Work OS as well as other apps, including GitHub, Teams, Gmail, and a variety of other popular apps.
• It really has the potential to become even better than ClickUp’s software releases page.
• There is sometimes a fine line between being funny and being annoying so it’s no surprise that some companies have started to come under fire for being too irreverent with their release notes.

Great release notes inform your customers about new features, keep them excited about what’s coming, and remind them about why they’re your customers in the first place. If you care about your customers, additional time spent on release notes can have a massive ROI later on. Remember, from the android play store to the company blog, keep them brief, on-brand, and innovative where you can. Release notes don’t need to be on every communication channel you have; it’s down to your business to decide where’s best to publish them, as well as how to do so.

If you can, while still getting across everything you need to, then go for it. If used effectively, they carve out a unique engagement channel for your users that will keep them thrilled about what’s coming next. Release notes also act as a direct line of communication with your power users and loyal customers. Release notes are an important way of communicating updates made to a platform to the end-user and internal team. LaunchNotes doesn’t offer a free plan, but their lowest paid plan is $24 per month.