John Saito
Aug 25, 2017 · 1 min read

After diving into the release notes problem, I now understand why larger companies don’t write them. As a company gets bigger, it’s not clear who should “own” the release notes. Writers? Engineers? Product Managers? Product Specialists? QA (for bug fixes)? Marketing (for new features)?

Larger companies also have dozens of different teams making changes to the codebase, so it’s not easy to coordinate all of that and determine what should be mentioned.

Larger companies also run a lot of UI experiments, so a certain percentage of users might see something that other people don’t. How should experiments be messaged in release notes?

And there’s also the challenge of localization, which often adds at least a few days to the process. If you write creative and entertaining release notes, those are incredibly hard to localize in dozens of languages. Plus, there’s a 500-character limit for Android, which makes things tougher in languages like German.

These are just some of the issues that larger companies face, but there are many more. It makes me sad to see generic release notes, but I can understand why some companies do that.

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    John Saito

    Written by

    Words @Dropbox Paper. Games at home. Previously at YouTube, Google, and Konami.