Release comms

release-comms

When to use

• A release is shipping that contains user-facing change and the team is about to send a feature-list email.
• A changelog draft reads like a commit log — engineering-honest, but unparseable for the user.
• Multiple comms surfaces (in-app, email, social, docs) are about to be written by different people from the same release.

Do NOT use for incident comms (see incident-commander), deprecation announcements that need legal sign-off, or pre-release discovery — this skill assumes the change is shipped.

Cognition cluster

• Mental model 16 — Leading vs. lagging indicators. A release note is the lagging artifact; the leading version is the in-app prompt that fired before the user found the change-log. See docs/contracts/mental-models.md § 16.
• Value-not-feature heuristic. Every paragraph passes the "so the user can ___" completion. Failing rows go back for re-write.

Procedure

Step 0: Ground the release

1. Read the merged PR list / changelog block / release branch diff. The release is the what; comms is the so what. Conflate the two and you ship marketing.
2. Read the product and team slots of the context-spine (if the consumer project has filled them) for bounded scope and release cadence — surface choice depends on cadence (weekly: in-app + log; quarterly: email + post; major: all four).
3. Identify the single dominant change the release ships. A release with three "headliners" reads as three half-announcements.

Step 1: Audience-segment

1. Three audiences max: active user, at-risk / lapsed user, prospect. More segments fragment the message; fewer hides the routing.
2. Per audience, write one sentence: "After this release, you can …" completing with a user-side verb, not a product-side feature.
3. If two audiences end up with the same sentence, collapse them — segmentation that does not change the message is theatre.

Step 2: Map surfaces to audiences

1. Changelog (always) — engineers + power users; truthful, dense, link-heavy. Source of truth — every other surface points back here.
2. In-app prompt — active users; ≤ 1 sentence + 1 CTA; fires for users whose past behaviour predicts they'll touch the new path.
3. Email — at-risk / lapsed; one headline value, one CTA, one paragraph of context. No feature lists.
4. Social / blog — prospect; the why, not the what — frame against the user job (cite customer-research if a switch-event surfaced).

Cut surfaces aggressively. A weekly release does not need a blog post.

Step 3: Draft each surface from the changelog

1. Open the changelog. Per surface, copy the dominant change line, then rewrite the verb subject from "we" to "you".
2. Strip qualifiers ("now", "even better", "lightning-fast"). They are noise, not signal.
3. Run the "so the user can ___" completion on every paragraph. Failing paragraphs are cut, not edited.

Step 4: Truth-check

1. Every claim links back to a changelog row or a doc URL. Unsourced claim → cut.
2. No tense games — past for shipped, future for coming-soon (and only if the date is committed). "Roadmap" lives outside this skill.
3. Names match the product surface. If the in-app says "Reports" and the email says "Insights", the user fires the lookup tax.

Step 5: Hand off

1. Produce the four artifacts (see ## Output).
2. Hand to whoever owns the send. Do not embed scheduling or A/B test plans here — that is RevOps.

Related Skills

WHEN to use this

• The change is shipped and needs to reach existing users.
• Multiple comms surfaces will be written by different people from the same source.
• The team is about to default to a feature-list email.

WHEN NOT to use this

• Production incident comms — route to incident-commander.
• Pre-release discovery / validation — route to customer-research.
• Funnel-stage diagnostics post-release — route to funnel-analysis.
• Ranking which release to comms next — route to rice-prioritization.

When the agent should load this

• "Write the release notes for sprint 47."
• "We're shipping the new export — how do we announce it?"
• "Draft the changelog email for last week's batch."
• "What's the in-app prompt copy for the redesign?"
• "Turn the merged PR list into something users can read."

Output

1. release-narrative.md — single source of truth: dominant change, audiences (1–3), per-audience "After this release, you can …" sentence, links to source changelog rows.
2. changelog-entry.md — engineer-honest, dense, link-heavy block ready to paste into the project's changelog.
3. comms-pack.md — per-surface drafts (in-app prompt, email, optional social/blog), each ≤ the surface's hard cap, each pointing back to changelog-entry.md.
4. comms-checklist.md — pre-send checks: every claim sourced, names consistent across surfaces, audience match, "so the user can …" completion passing on every paragraph. Hand-off artifact for the senior PO (product-owner; senior persona shipping in next plate).

Gotcha

• The default failure mode is feature-list email — written to make engineering feel seen, not to help the user.
• Marketing puffery ("revolutionary", "delightful") fails the source check; cut on sight.
• Two surfaces using different names for the same thing is the highest-frequency support-ticket trigger after a release.
• Hidden coming-soon claims in past-tense paragraphs erode trust faster than missing the comms entirely.

Do NOT

• Do NOT promote a coming-soon item alongside shipped items — the user cannot tell which is which and stops trusting the next note.
• Do NOT let a long-tail change steal the headline — the dominant change earns the headline, the long tail goes in the changelog.
• Do NOT ship surfaces without the truth-check pass; an unsourced claim survives in social longer than the release does.
• Do NOT paste more than a short excerpt from a linked source (commit message, PR body, issue thread) — content-quoting-floor caps verbatim quotes at 15 words, one per source; paraphrase the rest.

Runnable example

Sprint 47 ships a one-click monthly export and three small bug fixes:

• Dominant change: one-click export. Bug fixes go in changelog only.
• Audiences: active user (will use it), at-risk (export friction was a churn trigger per customer-research evidence-log).
• "After this release, you can pull a board-ready monthly report in one click." (active, at-risk — same sentence ⇒ collapse to one).
• Surfaces: changelog (full), in-app prompt to active users on next month-end, email to at-risk cohort with the same sentence and one CTA. No social.
• Truth-check: claim links to the export PR; "one click" is literal — verified against the shipped UI.

→ Final prose pass for audience-facing output: humanizer — remove AI-writing tells before delivery.