A changelog is a record of what's new in your product. Every time you ship something meaningful, a new feature, a significant improvement, a long-awaited bug fix, you write it down in plain language for the people using your product.
Customers don't experience your product the way your team does. They might log in once a week or once a month. Without a changelog, they miss what changed, and the work your team shipped goes unnoticed.
Best practices
Write for humans, not engineers. "Fixed an edge case in the webhook retry logic" means nothing to a customer. "Webhooks now retry automatically if your endpoint is temporarily down" does.
Ship it when you ship the feature. A changelog that's weeks behind loses its value. The best ones go out the same day.
Keep entries short. Two to four sentences is usually enough. Link to a help article if something needs more explanation.
Be consistent. A changelog updated sporadically is hard to trust. Even a short entry every two weeks builds more confidence than infrequent posts every few months.
It's also one of the most underrated tools for closing the feedback loop. When you ship something a customer asked for, pointing them to the changelog entry is an easy way to say "we heard you."
Publish and share your product updates with FeatureOS Release Notes.