A changelog is a simple but powerful way to communicate progress, culture and to celebrate wins. It can be used as a powerful tool to align and focus your team on creating user value.

Most teams do not place much importance on having good changelog write-ups.

Below I detail why a changelog is important and why you should be publishing changelogs:

Velocity: Changelogs help with keeping up the momentum within the team. During the early days of a startup, it is absolutely crucial to keep focused on delivering value to users. Publish a regular changelog helps the team focus and keep up with the development velocity.

Early Birds: Most early adopters of your product follow it very closely. They tend to be involved in shaping the product. A regularly published changelog allows those early adopters to have insight in how their input is molding the product – be it bug fixes or new feature requests.

Marketing & Investors: The early adopters we talked about above can spread the word about the product by sharing the changelogs with co-workers and friends. Angel investors and VCs can also take a look at the startup changelogs and get an idea of how the team is progressing on delivering the product roadmap. This can build investor confidence.

Culture & Recruiting: Publishing regular changelogs promotes the shipping culture within the startup. This also signals to prospective recruits on the mindset the team has and how they operate. This can appeal to a lot of talent out there looking for such work environments.

That is it! What do you think – should we place more emphasis on publishing changelogs? What other advantages of publishing changelogs which can be added to the above – drop a comment below!