How to Write Product Release Notes?
There are a lot of professional documents in product management. Every document has a special meaning and strategic importance.
The article posted on Hygger.io blog describes one of them – Release Notes doc.
Release Notes are tech documents that accompany products in beta stages or any product that has been enhanced or optimized. These notes explain all the details of the particular version of the product to customers or users.
How to write Release Notes? They shouldn’t be obliging as just a must-have. Release notes should be useful!
What are the goals of release notes?
- to inform customers/users about bug fixes.
- to focus testers on the bugs fixes and features correction.
- to prepare training materials, changes for user manuals, and descriptions.
- to advertising a new product version.
Release Notes are distributed with products. This doc can be delivered to customers when your update is released (for products that have already been in use by customers).
There is no ideal option on how to write release notes: you may find different variations of writing. Companies usually adopt their own formats based on product requirements and information types.
How do we write Release Notes?
Here’s the example of writing content for Release Notes:
- Header – the name of the document. You may include a product name, release date, and its number here.
- Brief – an overview of the product and changes.
- Goal – a brief overview of the Release Notes goals and what is new in this release.
- Summary – a short description of the bugs and issues.
- Steps to reproduce that were followed when the bugs were encountered.
- Resolution – optimization that was made to fix the bugs.
- Notes – the notes concerning a product installation, its upgrades, and documentation.
How do you prepare your Release Notes?