How to Write Compelling Release Announcements

> I was embarrassed that the release primarily made life better for our developers rather than for our users. Given the tasks I planned for a sprint, I identified the ones that would be exciting and valuable enough to the user to include in the release announcement.

> I thankfully avoided ever writing another uncomfortable explanation of a release that offers nothing to the user.

Seems short-sighted?

This is marketing-driven development where you have "learned the lesson" that thankless maintenance and stabilization tasks should be avoided.

I got the same impression, not having a snappy marketing tag line is nothing to be embarrassed about.

Sometimes users just don't get it - and never will. Sometimes things are too technical to be useful to a user (the author touches on this themselves). Let the results speak for themselves - and be proud of your achievements, it sounds like this was a success.

Focussing too heavily on user facing issues is a kind of myopia that actually leads to a worse user experience over time, and, ironically, a slower turnaround for those user facing issues.

Author here. Thanks for reading!

Considering the release announcement as part of sprint planning doesn't mean eliminating maintenance work. The release announcement is just the top N user-impacting changes in the release, so not every bit of dev work requires justification to the end-user.

The lesson I learned was that when I have a maintenance-heavy release, I needed to ensure that we have at least some work that's user-facing that we can present to users in the release announcement.