What’s New - Promote the new product version

What’s New section is included in release notes or might take a form of of its own. In either case, this section is used to communicate new features and bug fixes to the customers. Let us look at how What’s New was able to support product managers and guide customers.

Challenge

As technical writers, we all know how critical the release notes are! We write Release Notes to inform customer what new features or fixed issues or known issues a new release is bringing for them. However, with large products or products with annual releases, customers will have to look through a large doc set to understand what’s happening in a new release.

Add over 40 modules or components to the product mix, and customers will find navigating through module release notes. But what happened to the overall product change. Whether customer is using 1 module or 10, overall product changes are still relevant and probably more critical to ensure the modules keep working as expected.

In addition, there was no visible way to help customers get ready for the upcoming changes in advance.

Approach

I used the following approach:

• Think product rather than module
• Analyze all release notes and identify product level changes
• Define main sections to help user get to the area of interest quickly
• Focus on monthly input rather than end of release input
• Include global documentation changes as well
• Avoid module-specific content
• Include sections with changes only. Do not include a section if there is no corresponding change.

Solution

In discussion with product management, we decided to introduce What to Expect and What’s New sections.

• Start with What to Expect section: Update this section each month to gather inputs for release related What’s New section. This ensures that you get regular input for an upcoming release’s major product changes.
• Wrap up with What’s New section: Move all the content from What to Expect section to What’s New section close to release with the following Information Architecture. provided in the next section.Continue to build
• What to Expect section for the next release: Ensure that while prioritizing one release, you are continuing to think future and start building for the next release.

Information Architecture

• Release Notes
• What’s New
  • Visual Changes
  • Documentation Enhancements
  • Features and Enhancements
  • Software Support
  • Performance Improvements
  • End of Life Features
• Upcoming End of Life Features
• What to Expect in <add the release>

Result

A well-written What’s New section was able to accomplish the following for customers:

• Convey upcoming features for the overall product
• Convey call to action based on critical changes
• Help understand the scope of new release in advance

Product Managers were able to use the What to Expect section to convey the upcoming changes on a regular basis.

Example

• Click here to view an example