How to Write Compelling Release Announcements

Summary

A release announcement showcases how the user’s experience is better today than it was yesterday. That sounds obvious, but most release announcements seem to forget that there’s a user at all.So many release announcements just enumerate new features in a way that’s totallly divorced from how real people use the software. The announcement is essentially just a changelog with better writing.For example, here’s a “changelog” style of announcing a new feature:Added “duplicate” button to the event menu.Don’t just tell the user that there’s a new button. Tell the user what they can do with that button.Create events 10x faster🔗When you create a new event, chances are that the first thing you do is copy/paste information from an existing event. Creating events this way is tedious and slow, so we’re sparing you this toil with the new Duplicate feature.When you need to create a new event based on an existing event, go to the existing event, and select Options > Duplicate. Duplicating events is 10 times faster than copy/pasting fields.Note that the example doesn’t boast about what the software can do. It tells the user what they can do with the software. It speaks directly to the user, describing what happens when “you” create events.Release notes are not release announcements🔗Some software companies dump their commit history into a document, add some headings, and call that a release announcement.Not a release announcementThat is not a release announcement. Those are release notes.Release notes are fine, but they’re bookkeeping. They’re boring.If you want users to feel excited about your newest release, give them something more interesting to read than a sterile changelog.What to feature in a release announcement🔗What can the user do in the latest version that they couldn’t before?Which workflows became easier?Which workflows became faster?Notice that the questions don’t include, “Which feature took the longest to complete” or “What feature contains the cleverest algorithm?”I...