Revolutionizing Product Communication with Makelog's New Features

August 28, 2023 • Makelog Team

Effective communication is essential in the world of software development for delivering successful projects and keeping customers engaged. At Makelog, we are transforming how teams collaborate and communicate about releases.

In this blog post, we will explore Makelog's new features and how they align with our core principles of enhancing transparency, coordination, and productivity.

Makelog's Value Proposition: Building Shared Understanding and Automating Alerts

Software development involves different tools and workflows for various stakeholders, which often creates a "language barrier". Developers speak in terms of pull requests (PRs) and deployments, while product managers use features and epics. These nuances hinder effective communication between teams.

Makelog overcomes this barrier by centralizing information from various tools involved in the release process. The result? A platform that accelerates feature development and communication both internally and to relevant stakeholders.

Makelog's core value lies in fostering shared understanding among teams about ongoing projects and providing relevant information to customers at the right time. By identifying crucial communication touchpoints, we ensure that all stakeholders are kept informed through Slack alerts and other channels. This approach promotes efficient collaboration and successful feature launches.

Introducing the Change Feed: A Paradigm Shift

One of Makelog's new features is the Change Feed, which allows product managers to stay updated on the latest changes to their product and the status of changes in progress. Each change in the Change Feed represents a discrete unit of progress, including features, improvements, and bug fixes. These changes are derived from project management tools and environment variables, making them the "minimal marketable unit" of a product change.

The Change Feed operates in real-time, ensuring that all team members are instantly informed about the latest developments. This dynamic feed automatically shares status updates, eliminating the need for constant manual updates.

Filters further empower users to customize their view of the feed, whether by type, status, or environment. These filters provide instant access to the most relevant information. Future enhancements will include the ability to view all customer-facing changes and features at a glance.

Leveraging AI to Enhance Communications

Makelog utilizes GPT to transform technical descriptions of product changes into human-readable content. This AI-driven feature also determines the type of change being made and whether it is customer-facing, streamlining the process of pushing out release notes.

Using Environments to Understand What’s “Done-Done”

Makelog simplifies the complexities of managing the lifecycle of changes by incorporating the concept of deployment environments. Each change is associated with its current context, such as staging or production. The environment can be set through Makelog's API or inferred from GitHub deployments or reserved branch names.

Knowing when a change is available in the staging or production environment enables effective communication for testing, demoing, and sharing with customers.

Real-time Slack Alerts: Staying Informed Has Never Been Easier

For teams using Slack as part of their release communications strategy, Makelog introduces real-time Slack alerts. Users can choose to publish updates to specific Slack channels or groups of channels to ensure relevant parties are updated on the status of changes, such as closing an issue or moving a completed feature to production.

In the future, Makelog plans to enhance this feature to enable users to monitor feature flag status, providing insights into feature rollouts and adoption rates.

Seamless Release Communication with Internal Releases and a Public Changelog

Makelog's Releases feature offers a simple yet powerful solution for publishing updates internally or to your public changelog. Users can easily select changes to communicate and initiate a release. This feature emphasizes speed while allowing users to customize the content as needed.

Changes are automatically grouped into sections by type and summarized concisely, enabling quick generation of release notes. Users can enhance updates with images and descriptions to create visually appealing and engaging communications.

Modernize Your Release Communication Process with Makelog

Makelog's new features represent a significant advancement in collaborative software development. With the Change Feed, AI-powered enhancements, environment integration, real-time alerts, and a streamlined Release Page, Makelog simplifies the challenges of efficient and effective software release communications. Users can expect improved transparency, shared understanding, and more successful feature launches.

Experience the future of collaborative software development by trying Makelog today.