How to Write Compelling Release Announcements

Author here. Happy to take any feedback or questions about this post.

I read the whole thing and didn't know what a release announcement was until the section where you pointed to "real world examples," which linked to elsewhere. I did pick up from your text that they are not the same as release notes though. Could I suggest you succinctly define what you consider to be a release announcement at the outset?

Thanks for reading! That's great feedback.

Do you feel like this would be a helpful definition to include at the top?

>A release announcement is a summary of the changes that will have the greatest impact on the user's experience. It presents them in a clear, accessible way that focuses on the user.

Working at a company that has a structure for our product announcements that falls in line with this article, everything you said resonated. It is very interesting to come to the comments and see some negative feeling towards writing that is focused on the end user. I mean I get it, HN has a heavy user base of software engineers and so there is likely bias in what a software engineer wants to read vs the typical end user. It seems there may be value in product announcement geared towards end users and a release notes geared towards developers.

Thanks for reading and for the kind words!

I know a lot of the comments are critical, but I find the feedback helpful, and I've already made some improvements to the article based on the comments here. In some cases, I think there's pure disagreement, where some commenters feel that anything other than a dev-oriented changelog is "selling out" to marketing. Some of the feedback is misunderstanding what I'm advocating (e.g., some readers perceived the post as advocating release announcements instead of changelogs). But in the end, my audience for this post is developers, so it's helpful to hear candid reactions from developers, even though I know HN commenters aren't perfectly representative of developers in general.