Telling people what changed
I handle both kinds of release notes: the internal ones that keep teams on the same page, and the customer-facing ones that explain what's new without the jargon. And I build the process behind them.
Building the OTA release-notes process from scratch
The problem
When I joined, there was no real process for in-vehicle over-the-air (OTA) release notes. They were inconsistent, teams kept duplicating each other's work, and it was generally a mess. No clear owner, no timeline, no ticketing, and nobody sure who was even supposed to be involved.
What I did
I built a process that runs cleanly through our team. A request comes in, we do the research, draft the notes, run them through a short review and approval, and they ship. There isn't much back-and-forth anymore. I also made the supporting pieces around it: process maps, writing guidelines, and onboarding docs. Those help everyone involved, from Product and Engineering to Operations, Design, and sometimes Marketing, understand how the whole thing actually works.
Here's one of the process maps I made in FigJam while I was setting this up. It lays out the full flow, from the engineer's request through drafting, review, and legal approval, along with the questions writers need answered, the wording we prefer, and who owns what at each step.
This is now the process every OTA release note follows. The duplicated work and the endless back-and-forth are gone, notes move smoothly from request to approval, and I'm handling more of them than anyone thought was doable. New people pick it up quickly, too.
Doing the same for new-feature releases
Beyond OTA updates, I did the same kind of thing for new feature releases: working out the process, the writing guidelines, and the relationships across teams needed to tell customers what's new.
The map above shows the process. Here's the writing itself: release notes I wrote for a feature update, as they appear on the screen in the vehicle. A driver has a few seconds and no patience for jargon, so every line has to tell them something useful. What the update does, how to turn the feature on, where to learn more, and a heads-up about the one thing that might otherwise worry them.
