Product Habits - Product’s holy grail?

People really love changelogs, here are a few of the replies that I got last week:

"I'm a big fan of the in-app changelog, as it targets the most relevant audience as a retention tactic: active users."
"Changelog is IMO the easiest way to compel engagement in new features."
"Changelogs in the product help drive awareness and actions."

But there’s a catch. Take a look at this reply I received:

"If I see that nothing’s been done for a couple of months, it doesn’t give me faith that the shortcomings of the product will be tended to."

Product momentum, or its absence, becomes transparent to your customers.

The changelog becomes a proxy for your roadmap and shipping cadence. It takes deliberate ongoing effort to create, distribute and maintain a product pace that hits the mark with customers.

And when you fail at it, your customers will know.

On the flip side, a changelog becomes one of the strongest reassurances of your commitment to customers when you succeed.

"Best part of public changelog = clear proof that the product you’re using now is alive, and improving. This is the WORST you’ll ever see it, because there’s people working to improve what you’re using."

It’s a way to stay accountable. By being focused on shipping value to customers while making sure they know all about it.

Changelogs can be a huge motivator that creates momentum for you and your team.

The most frequent "user feedback" I heard about changelogs was that companies tend to share boring updates and people stop reading them after a while.

"It's like the team ran out of steam just getting the darn feature over the finish line and had zero energy left to tell me why they spent 80 hours producing it."
"Despite good intentions, I rarely read all of it."
"I love the release notes that are human, not just “we made it better” a la Facebook or Uber mobile apps."

People shared their favorite not so boring changelogs with me too. Notion’s changelog got the top spot, with the runner up being a digital bank called Up. Webflow, Todoist, Linear, HubSpot, and ConvertKit were also mentioned.

We’re noodling on everything we’ve learned so far to figure out what to do for FYI. I’ll share more about what we’re doing and why in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned!

Hiten =)

P.S. See what we’re changing first-hand by requesting access to FYI for Teams from the homepage.

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Product Habits - Product’s holy grail?

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