# What is Product Update?

A product update is any communication a software team sends about a change to the product — encompassing release notes, changelog entries, in-app announcements, marketing emails, and social media posts about a shipped feature. The term is the umbrella category that includes more specific forms like release notes (per-version) and changelog (the running log). Product updates can target customers, integrators, internal teams, or the broader market depending on the channel and audience.


## Example

When Linear ships a new feature, the product update typically lives
in four places at once: the public changelog page on linear.app/changelog,
the in-app "What's new" widget with an unread badge, a tweet from the
Linear account, and an email to subscribers. Each is a different
surface for the same product update, tuned to the audience and channel.

## Why it matters

Thinking in "product updates" rather than "release notes" or "changelog"
changes how the work gets organized. A single product update event
(a feature ships) generates content for multiple channels with
different voice, length, and visual treatment per channel. Teams
that operationalize this — one author, multiple destinations, one
approval flow — ship updates more consistently. Teams that don't
often skip channels (the changelog gets it but the email doesn't,
or the tweet goes out but the in-app widget doesn't update).

## More context

The four most common destinations for a single product update:

**1. Hosted changelog page.** The canonical record. SEO-indexable on your own domain. The "source of truth" for what shipped and when. Stripe's `/changelog`, Linear's `/changelog`, Vercel's `/changelog` are all this surface.

**2. In-product widget.** Embedded inside your app, surfaced to logged-in users via an unread badge. The "right place at the right time" surface — users see the update while they're using the product, not while they're in their inbox.

**3. Subscriber email.** Sent to people who opted in to release notifications. The "push" surface — reaches users who aren't currently logged in, and lets them forward to teammates who'd care.

**4. Social posts.** Tweets, LinkedIn posts, Bluesky, Mastodon. The "reach" surface — broadcasts to people who aren't customers yet but might be. Most effective when a real human (a founder, an engineer who built the thing) writes the post in their own voice rather than from the brand account.

The same product update event generates content tuned to each channel:

- Changelog page: full structured release notes with all categories
- In-app widget: highlight 1-3 items, omit minor fixes, link to full changelog
- Email: subject line that names the most user-visible feature, body that runs longer than the widget but shorter than the full page
- Social: one-line summary plus a screenshot or short video

Tools like [Herald](/) treat the product update as the underlying event and generate the four surfaces from one source — same content, four representations, no copy-paste between them. The alternative (writing four separate versions per release) is the friction that makes most teams skip channels and end up with a stale widget, an empty email list, or a silent social feed.

For the practical "how to write the content for these channels" piece, see the [release notes guide](/blog/how-to-write-release-notes/).

## Related terms

- [Release Notes](/glossary/release-notes/)
- [Changelog](/glossary/changelog/)
- [Changelog vs Release Notes](/glossary/changelog-vs-release-notes/)

Deeper guide: [How to write release notes users actually read](/blog/how-to-write-release-notes/)

Category: Distribution
Last reviewed: 2026-05-28