At incident.io, we have made it a priority to provide our customers with meaningful updates every week since our company’s inception. In the last 4 years, we have written over 200 updates, and we recently achieved a milestone of going 2 years without missing a single week.
While the numbers are not the ultimate goal, the consistency of this practice and what it signifies for our customers and team is incredibly important to us. It’s a topic that founders and product leaders at early-stage companies often inquire about, so I wanted to share some insights into why we do this and how we have streamlined the process over the years.
Here are three key principles that we established early on for our changelog, which have remained largely unchanged:
1. We commit to writing an update every week without fail. This is a core aspect of our changelog that demonstrates the dedication and effort our team puts into our product and the value we deliver to our customers. We always strive to ensure that customers are able to do more by the end of the week than they could at the start. This commitment serves as proof of our ability to deliver quickly and respond to feedback, which is crucial for a growing startup.
2. Each update is written by a human, not automated or copied from technical logs. This manual process allows us to carefully consider how we communicate the value of each change to our customers, rather than just listing technical details.
3. Updates are scoped to the previous week only, including both significant new features and minor bug fixes. We aim to provide a snapshot of our progress each week without carrying over unfinished items to the next changelog. In weeks with a high volume of changes, we may release a “bonus changelog” to cover everything adequately.
Our approach to changelogs started as a manual process, with weekly updates written in markdown and reviewed by our team. Over time, we have refined our methods and integrated automated tools to streamline the process and ensure that every team member contributes to articulating the value of their changes for customers.
Consistency, human touch, and focus on weekly progress have been the cornerstones of our changelog practice at incident.io, and we continue to uphold these principles to provide our customers with transparent and informative updates every week. If they believe none of their issues are significant enough to be included in the changelog, they simply indicate that to us. We make it clear either way, which helps the changelog writer know when everyone has reviewed the updates and it’s ready to be published. We also use relevant emoji indicators like:
– 🆕 New feature!
– 💅 Polished a rough edge
– 👷♂️ Investment / non-customer-facing improvement
– 🐛 Fixed a bug
Our goal is to make the changelog updates customer-centric and user-friendly, focusing on what users can now do that they couldn’t before, and explaining it in a way we would to a customer face-to-face. Hey there! So, we kicked things off by making sure all our customers were in the loop with our changelog updates. We set up RSS feeds for every channel so that whenever we had new posts, everyone would get notified.
As time went on, we noticed that weekly updates were a bit overwhelming for some folks. That’s when we decided to switch things up and started writing less frequent “Customer Changelogs” that covered a few weeks at a time. We also started including more general company updates, like the SEV0 conference we hosted earlier this year.
We’ve added some cool automation to keep things lively. Now, any reactions or replies to our changelog posts in customer channels get shared in #changelogs-pulse. It’s always a blast to see all the positive feedback and excitement from our customers ❤️
One thing we realized was that we weren’t always great at following up with customers who gave feedback. To fix that, we started tagging all customers in Linear with labels and syncing this info with our customer CRM. This way, we can send personalized messages when a change goes live, like the one our friends at Netflix experienced. It’s a game-changer for keeping our Product and Commercial teams on the same page.
And remember, just start! It’s a piece of advice I often give to early-stage founders. Sharing your progress publicly can be a huge motivator and a great way to stay accountable to your team and customers.
No matter where you are on your changelog journey, I hope some of these insights were helpful. I’m incredibly proud of our team for consistently delivering quality updates for over 2 years. We’re on track to publish close to 70 changelogs this year, and we’re determined to make each one count! 💪
Good luck with your own changelog adventures, and here’s to many more exciting updates ahead! Rewrite the sentence.
