I Asked Slack's Marketing Team About The Story Behind Its Unconventional Release Notes

I created a post earlier analyzing Slack's creative release notes strategy, However I wanted to get some extra insights from the team on the story behind its unconventional strategy..

What inspired Slack to start including creative copy in its release notes? Has this had any impact on user retention or brand perception?

"Before Slack was the platform it is today, the founding team was creating a video game called Glitch.

The Glitch team built a delightful game world featuring surprises around every corner. As the novelty wore off, the surprises had to stay delightful to keep people in the game. That core attitude of making a user's time with us as pleasant as possible stuck when the team transitioned to building Slack.

Release notes offered a blank canvas where Slack could display its unique tone and personality. As Slack built its natural organizational voice, we saw release notes as a way to express ourselves and dialogue with customers beyond just “improvements and bug fixes."

Each set of release notes aimed to achieve a few things:

1/ To let people know Slack was constantly improving and we were listening to bug reports and addressing them.

2/ To educate users about lesser-known features.

3/ To celebrate our engineering team's work, acknowledge mistakes, and lay out our plans to improve. We wanted people to appreciate our playful approach and emulate it.

And we’ve seen users and the wider public respond to these notes enthusiastically, as they’ve gone viral more than once, like this tweet from Arianna Huffington.

These release notes resonate with people because they are a small way we infuse humanity into the often grey world of enterprise products."

Shout out to the Slack marketing team that took the time to answer these questions :)

---

If you enjoyed this post, you will enjoy my newsletter at The Growth Archive where I curate real-world B2B marketing examples like this every week.