Release Notes: Strategy, Collaboration, and Transparency

As a product marketer, I spend much of my time thinking about how to communicate effectively with our clients. Sometimes that means finding the perfect balance between transparency and simplicity – ensuring our clients get the information they need without overwhelming them with unnecessary details or wasting their valuable time.

A significant part of this communication strategy involves release notes. On the Silverchair Platform, we release new features and functionality every 3-4 weeks. This rapid deployment schedule is fantastic because it keeps our platform dynamic and allows us to continuously improve both our front-end and back-end experiences. However, this frequency can present unique communication challenges, especially for busy publishers who need to stay informed about platform changes.

More importantly than simply knowing what's happening, our clients need to understand how each release impacts them, how they can implement new features, and how these updates will help them achieve their strategic goals. Release notes serve as a crucial bridge between our development team and publishers.

Building a Strong Foundation

Release notes represent much more than documentation – they are key awareness tools that enable decision-making and collaboration. Research indicates that well-crafted release notes can increase product adoption by up to 30% and significantly reduce support tickets. 

The most effective release notes harness the best practices found in all communication: they're clear, concise, and user-focused. They use accessible language that makes complex technical changes understandable to diverse audiences, much like how scholarly publishers must balance technical accuracy with readability.

Embracing Client-Led Development

At Silverchair, more than two-thirds of our platform improvements come from client ideas, ongoing client projects, and suggestions. This collaborative approach fundamentally transforms our release notes from one-way announcements into parts of an ongoing dialogue between our team and our community.

We thank our clients for their active participation in platform improvement by acknowledging their contributions with specific tags marking which releases were inspired by fellow clients.

Maintaining Publisher Control

Many of our releases either autodeploy, in which new functionalities are activated automatically, or are easily added with a simple action on the part of our clients. However, in other areas where clients might need to update workflows or processes, or where they might not want to use features that don't align with their needs and priorities, they remain in complete control. This graduated approach ensures clients aren't overwhelmed by unwanted changes while still benefiting from continuous improvement.

Implementing Thematic Categorization

We're constantly working to improve our release notes, and recently we've added a new categorization scheme that allows clients to quickly scan updates and identify what they can accomplish with each release. This publisher-centered approach enables busy professionals to efficiently navigate complex information, focusing on features that align with their specific goals. While we fully expect release categories to change as publisher priorities evolve, we’re implementing the following categories for releases:

Revenue + growth: releases that increase sales, retention, or expand market reach so clients can make money or grow their user base

Operational efficiency: releases that save administrative time and streamline processes so clients can focus on higher level strategy

User experience + engagement: releases that offer authors, members, and readers greater satisfaction, personalization, and accessibility

Data + insights: releases that help clients make better decisions with new visibility into user behaviors, reporting, and performance tracking

Risk + compliance: releases that protect site content and data privacy, and make sites more reliable and secure

This targeted approach makes it significantly easier for clients to make informed decisions more quickly. We also avoid multiple thematic categories for each release, instead categorizing work that can have multiple outcomes or benefits with the strongest fit. For example, operational efficiency will often help with revenue as it saves time that ultimately impacts our clients’ bottom line, but the primary benefit is streamlined processes.

Empowering Decision-Making

For the teams at Silverchair, release notes serve as critical tools for awareness, but more importantly, they function as powerful tools for our clients. We want to empower our community to use release notes to make informed decisions, guide platform development, and spark ideas for new features. By treating release notes as communication tools rather than administrative necessities, we build stronger relationships with our clients while driving innovation and growth.

This philosophy transforms what could be routine technical announcements into opportunities for meaningful collaboration and strategic advancement.