How to write great release notes

From increasing adoption to acting as great SEO content, learn all about how release notes can help you (and your customers!)

Release notes are the most undervalued pieces of growth bypassed by most teams. Most often seen as boring documents to write, they’re treated as an afterthought of the product development process.

If this sounds familiar, let me let you in on a little secret: you’re seriously missing out.

Release notes can be used to your advantage to drive adoption, increase growth, and build trust and transparency with your community.

Let’s review!

Nobody reads my release notes

You may be thinking nobody cares about your release updates, and maybe you’re right. Not everybody will be reading them, but those that do will be your most engaged users and powerful advocates.

I myself used to think nobody read them until the time I stopped writing them due to a big internal update that required no external communication. That’s when a bunch of concerned customers reached out asking if the product was shutting down due to lack of development. That’s when I knew there was a hidden value here.

Adam Sigel, VP of Product at Hometap says this about release notes:

“Release notes are a really interesting engagement opportunity to me — most people don’t read them, but those that do represent a highly targeted audience of very engaged users. Every company with an app has to write them, and I love to see who treats it like an opportunity instead of a chore.”

If you’re still not convinced, let’s look at a few more reasons why you should start making use of them.

Keeping things organized

I’ve worked with teams that didn’t even keep internal release notes together, or if they did, they weren’t organized. Release notes were often kept in development tools with little access to the rest of the team, and it was hard to track down when and how things were done.

This is your opportunity to show all product-related updates both internally and externally. Not only…