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How to Write Compelling Release Announcements

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69 points mtlynch | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 14:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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ukuina ◴[25 Jun 25 15:38 UTC] No.44378536[source]▶
> 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.

replies(2): >>44378907 #>>44378938 #
1. mtlynch ◴[25 Jun 25 16:12 UTC] No.44378938[source]▶
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.