29 Nov Discussion Board
Discussion Board
“Who is the audience of Release Notes? Why does one need it?”
In the swiftly advancing landscape of technology, maintaining fluid and consistent communication with users is becoming increasingly crucial. Accelerated release cycles facilitate rapid software enhancements, ideally contributing to heightened product quality. However, the relevance of your product hinges on users being aware of its updated features and advantages. Release Notes serve as a valuable resource, offering details about the latest features, improvements, and resolutions of issues in a specific software update.
The primary target audience of Release Notes is product users. Release Notes serve as a communication tool between the development team and the users. Apart from end users and developers, the audience for release notes includes system administrators, quality assurance teams, and project managers.
In the following discussion, we will know the different views of technical writers from different cities on “Who is the audience of Release Notes? Why does one need it?”
The Discussion
The target audience can be product/business users, developers, administrators, and other stakeholders, such as investors, the marketing/sales team, etc. We need them mostly as product announcements to tell the audience about the feature and security enhancements. These also show the transparency and commitment of the product so that it stays reliable and relevant in the market.
Gumma Venkatesh Santosh
Hyderabad
Prospective User or customer whether to buy the product or not. To understand the new updates to the feature.
Ruchira Joshi
Maharashtra
Release Notes primary audiences: product users, marketing, and sales teams.
Secondary audience: all internal and external stakeholders that also include prospective users, decision-makers, investors, etc.
Deepdisha
Maharashtra
Internal: Sales Engineers and Support
External: End users and prospect customers
Akash Jujam
Maharashtra
Release notes are used by a variety of users, and these user types depend on how the product is distributed.
For large enterprise products, there exists a role called account managers. The account managers eagerly await release notes to check if the resolutions to their clients' issues are present in the release in question. Release notes are seen as a quick reference to the new features or enhancements. So, user SPOCs and system administrators quickly glance through the release notes.
It should be noted that release notes need careful editing. They typically contain information in the initial drafts that should not inadvertently be sent out for public consumption. For example, the fixes to the bugs identified during testing.
Ravindra Dhumane
Maharashtra
Technical documentation, QA's, BA's, product managers, lead, support, and users, and prospective clients.
With release notes, you come to know new features, new additions, changes that will affect your scope, UI changes, bugs, and PIR fixes that are done.
It helps with historical records and references. And in which branch these changes are done.
Rama Shadija
Maharashtra
In my current organization, it is the customer service team. They are involved in implementing the product at the client's site, and hence they need to be aware of the new features and bug fixes.
It is another matter that at times they overlook the release notes and, at a later date, question the documentation team as to why this feature is there in the user guide.
Kamalakannan
Chennai
Anyone who would use the new version of the software has to know the new features, feature improvements, bug fixes from earlier versions, and any known issues in this release. This would tell them what to expect from this release.
Venkatesh A
Chennai
A customer who wants to know about the new features, enhancements, and value added for their company.
Soni Hari
Chennai
We have three audiences in our company for Release Notes.
- Internal teams: They needed tech stacks and tech information.
- Sales and marketing: Market the new features or anticipated enhancements with market impact.
- Customers: What's new in their purchased SAAS product?
Keshav Arora
Delhi (NCR)
Anyone who's using your product and is interested in being updated about what's new in the product. Could be those responsible for maintaining the software, end users, as well as competitors.
Rohit Parmar
Gujarat
Internal and external customers. RN is used in marketing, sales, pre-sales, support, and training.
RN is the most IMP artefact, the most sloppily authored, or the most automated.
Chandrak
Gujarat
Release Notes highlight ongoing enhancements to existing products. It also contains newly added features on a time-to-time basis. Most of the time, the target audience is users. But it will be useful for internal teams seeking insights into product developments.
Rushabh Patel
Gujarat
Release Notes usually inform the customer ahead of time what enhancements are going to be introduced in the product.
Also, important bugs got fixed.
It can also announce the sunset of certain features.
Mridula Menon
Bengaluru
Release Notes are for the end-product user. It provides an overview of the enhancements and changes made to the product that affect the user experience.
Arati Kumbhar
Bengaluru
To add on, Release Notes also help with doc information to the internal audience, the DevOps team, QA's, and us, the technical writers.
Bhavana G
Bengaluru
The audience would be anybody who is a direct customer or user of the product. Roles will differ from domain and industry, no?
In a typical software product context:
- Administrators: to understand infra/config requirements, if any. Also, to decide when and how to plan upgrades
- Non-admin regular users: to know how the features in the product solve their business problem
- Security team: to understand if security vulnerabilities have been addressed
Revathi
Kerala
In a mainframe product, applicable roles are:
- System programmer: installs and upgrades the product
- Security administrator: sets up the initial passwords and policies
- Application developer: configures the product after installation
These are the audience for my release notes and technical bulletins.
These notices will contain product enhancements, bug fixes, and sometimes information about deprecated features.
Even though our end-user documentation is available to the general public (you can view it without logging in), notices are not public.
Revathi
Kerala
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