How to Write Compelling Software Release Announcements
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:
Bad: Describe what the dev team did rather than how it benefits the user 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.
Good: Describe how changes benefit the user 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.
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