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'Release dashboard' to celebrate small wins!

All the small updates add up quickly! Bug fixes, enhancements and tiny features – they're not very exciting to share, but they're really important.

🎉 Now Letter has it's own Release Notes page, powered by Olvy 📝(made by @iamarnob and @nshntarora)

I've added 3 pages worth of updates (22 posts), backdated from what I'd previously shared on Letter's Twitter. It's nice to look back on, but here are some of the benefits I found of having a dedicated place to publish release notes:

Publish BORING updates

One of the my favourites: a place to publish fixes and boring stuff that won't excite blog readers.

For example, this update [https://letter.olvy.co/44742f22-116a-4c84-bda9-31bdf343eee9](Letter 0.1: Fixes and Improvements) is a list of small fixes. They can't really be announced individually as exciting features, but collectively can make a new 'version' of the app.

Get feedback/reactions

Another useful thing is you can gage the reactions to product updates. I haven't seen any comments yet, but in Olvy they also have 'Reactions', so I can see some helpful stats:

Release note reactions

Celebrate small wins!

From the outside, it can look like you've made no improvements - no new features and no news! Also, sometimes it can feel like you've achieved nothing, yet done a lot of work. So the release notes can help celebrate small wins and share fixes in a digestible format.

That's all - for anyone else that uses release notes, this all is probably obvious..but I'd never used them before 😅

Recent Letter releases:

  1. 3

    Thanks for the review, Graeme. I will check out Olvy.

    By the way, I use to concentrate all users' reactions and discussions in company social networks (mostly Twitter). I believe it helps to grow the follow base. I'm curious what do you think about it?

    1. 1

      Cheers Alexander, I too use social for sharing the updates - i think it's more for engaging things like new feature, or sharing stats.. whereas it's kindof boring to tweet something like: 'fixed 4 bugs and added better form validation'

      I think the release notes is closer to a 'changelog' (like you have on Unicorn Platform!) than social. Or somewhere in between cos you can add a bit more commentary

      For reactions on Olvy- they're nice, but I'm yet to see the practical impact having just started. My guess is that reactions are more useful at an earlier stage when prioritising and deciding features

  2. 2

    Thank you so much Graeme and the letters team for this article, and so glad to have you onboard.

    1. 1

      No probs, I was due an update and this has been the biggest change recently. Glad to be on board too, thanks for all the help with it!

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