For two years our changelog was a list of bullet points nobody outside the company read. It is now the second most visited page on our site. We changed three things.
Lead with the problem
Every entry opens with the situation it fixes, in the customer’s words, not ours. Not improved filtering performance. Instead: filtering a board with more than 500 cards used to take about four seconds. It is now under 200 milliseconds.
Show it
Every entry that changes something visible has a short clip. Not a polished product video, just the thing happening. It takes ten minutes to record and it is the single largest driver of people clicking through to the feature.
Ship the small ones
We used to hold small fixes back so the entry would look substantial. That was exactly backwards. The small entries are what makes people believe the product is alive, and they are the ones that get replies.
The one rule we added later: no entry ships without a link to the thing it describes. A changelog that does not take you anywhere is a press release.
