Why you Should Never Release a Product Without Release Notes

“What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence.”
― Samuel Johnson

Problem

For each new product, I've tried to update release notes diligently, but somehow always failed to follow through. There are always so many things to do when you launch a new release. Updating release notes is definitely not on top of the list, and therefore often gets neglected. However, I've realized that having updated release notes can help me and my stakeholders by describing the value that each new version introduced. But still, I had two problems that were blocking me:

• I haven't found a good tool for release notes
• I had to spend a lot of time figuring out the format for the notes

Jira was never my favorite tool, and the concept of release notes within that tool wasn't good enough to convey the value delivered with each release. I've also tried writing a free-format document and sharing it as a pdf, but that turned out to be a mess too.

Solution

However, I've managed to find a good solution. These two roadblocks disappeared as soon as I found out about Notion and the concept of Notion templates. The benefits that Notion introduced were:

• Flexible release notes format
• Easy to manage the content
• Pre-filled release notes pages
• Easy to share with users and stakeholders
• Easy to display all versions and sort by various parameters
• Awesome look & feel

I've created a landing page, where the changelog for each version is listed out with some basic information. So at a glance, you can see how many versions have been released, when was it released and what is the highlight of that version. This was a high-level overview of the progress and improvement timeline. If you want to find out more about each version, you can drill down and learn more.

Each version has a set of metadata:

• Release Date - when was the update released
• Description - short description that conveys the value delivered to the users.
• Deployed to - if you have multiple environments (development, QA, staging, production) this flag provides the info about where did you deploy these changes
• Version Tags - version number to tie it with Jira or GitHub
• Version Cover - a cover image if you want to get fancy

The main part of my release notes template consists of three sections:

• Important Changes - using this to highlight the product value
• New Features - the list of new features
• Resolved Issues - the list of things that we've fixed

If you want to drill down even more, you can explore each individual feature or resolved issue with a click. Each feature can be described with a value proposition, use case, and the next steps (development plan).

Benefits

This approach enables you to provide so many details for your stakeholders or users, but only if they want to see them. So you're not pushing a lot of information in their faces - you are providing a progressive disclosure on the user's request.

So, using Notion for release notes helped me with:

• Highlighting product value with each update
• Creating notes fast - with pre-filled templates
• Keeping the notes consistent - using the same template
• Sharing and updating - just send the URL
• Driving the interest of users and stakeholders

I encourage you to create your own template and experiment with Notion features. Also, you can get my template here, if you want to save a couple of hours creating it from scratch.

I'm sure this will drive more interest in your product. Also, this way you will make a statement, letting everybody know that you're a pro - not only do you deliver a great product - you're also documenting diligently.

First Published here