Every Thursday my PM would ping me: "is this feature shipped yet?". It was shipped 3 days earlier.
As head of engineering, I encourage to release the fastest and the more often we can. So we try to release every few commits and whenever a feature is finished to avoid big messy testing. We empower our dev as Feature Lead: meaning they are responsible for the feature to work in prod: the Feature Lead organize however he/she wants to build, test and ship the feature. It works extremely well but we ship too fast for the PM to stay up to date. PM stands for Product Manager and for Project Manager.
The real problem took me a while to see: dev write commits that are linked to our Linear issues. Tech explanations are in commits, product explanations are in linear issues. So we need to build a release note from this 2 sources each time a release in prod happens.
What I did? Each time a release (semver release) happens on github, it triggers a webhook. Changelogfast fetch commits + linked linear issues and write one note object per audience: Slack for the ops team, email for my boss, a public page for users, each rendered in its own tone. Ops Team needs "human" explanation, my boss just an executive summary and dev technical explanations.
Then I thought instead of writing codes for each change, I could create a front and back to configure new webhooks: this is how changelogfast was born.
Two things I didn't plan to build, but shipped anyway:
1/ A weekly digest, because of a message in Linear's community Slack. A CTO asked for "a summary of what shipped, every week". So every monday she receives directly in her email box an executive summary of what was shipped this last calendar week.
2/ A GitHub Action that writes the note into the GitHub Release. It sounds very fitting to have this kind of job but it means Changelogfast needs extra rights on the repo: 'Contents: write'. It means right to commit. I think it might stop people at this step. Here is an example of what it can output: https://github.com/changelogfast/changelog-fast-action/relea...
The deal: no free tier (plans start at $9/month) — solo product, and every note costs me model spend.
How do you handle this today? If you've solved "is it shipped yet?" with a script, a Notion doc, or just better discipline, I'd genuinely like to hear what worked — and what it cost you to maintain.
Everywhere I worked, PMs were ultimately in charge of deciding what gets shipped and when so "is this feature shipped yet?" is the last question I would expect from them.
It's probably a good thing that you build this but there definitely are deeper issues at play, here.
In our org we defined a "feature lead" role who is responsible for the whole build-and-release process. Feature Lead should fully understand the why and the impacts. PM has a more strategic role. (perhaps that is the issue :-) )
In my mind "changelogfast" can be helpful for Product Manager but also Project Manager, sales...etc. Or CTO/CPO to know what was shipped on a calendar week basis.
Every Thursday my PM would ping me: "is this feature shipped yet?". It was shipped 3 days earlier.
As head of engineering, I encourage to release the fastest and the more often we can. So we try to release every few commits and whenever a feature is finished to avoid big messy testing. We empower our dev as Feature Lead: meaning they are responsible for the feature to work in prod: the Feature Lead organize however he/she wants to build, test and ship the feature. It works extremely well but we ship too fast for the PM to stay up to date. PM stands for Product Manager and for Project Manager.
The real problem took me a while to see: dev write commits that are linked to our Linear issues. Tech explanations are in commits, product explanations are in linear issues. So we need to build a release note from this 2 sources each time a release in prod happens.
What I did? Each time a release (semver release) happens on github, it triggers a webhook. Changelogfast fetch commits + linked linear issues and write one note object per audience: Slack for the ops team, email for my boss, a public page for users, each rendered in its own tone. Ops Team needs "human" explanation, my boss just an executive summary and dev technical explanations.
Then I thought instead of writing codes for each change, I could create a front and back to configure new webhooks: this is how changelogfast was born.
Two things I didn't plan to build, but shipped anyway:
1/ A weekly digest, because of a message in Linear's community Slack. A CTO asked for "a summary of what shipped, every week". So every monday she receives directly in her email box an executive summary of what was shipped this last calendar week.
2/ A GitHub Action that writes the note into the GitHub Release. It sounds very fitting to have this kind of job but it means Changelogfast needs extra rights on the repo: 'Contents: write'. It means right to commit. I think it might stop people at this step. Here is an example of what it can output: https://github.com/changelogfast/changelog-fast-action/relea...
The deal: no free tier (plans start at $9/month) — solo product, and every note costs me model spend.
How do you handle this today? If you've solved "is it shipped yet?" with a script, a Notion doc, or just better discipline, I'd genuinely like to hear what worked — and what it cost you to maintain.
Everywhere I worked, PMs were ultimately in charge of deciding what gets shipped and when so "is this feature shipped yet?" is the last question I would expect from them.
It's probably a good thing that you build this but there definitely are deeper issues at play, here.
In our org we defined a "feature lead" role who is responsible for the whole build-and-release process. Feature Lead should fully understand the why and the impacts. PM has a more strategic role. (perhaps that is the issue :-) )
In my mind "changelogfast" can be helpful for Product Manager but also Project Manager, sales...etc. Or CTO/CPO to know what was shipped on a calendar week basis.