Open Stack

Release marketing is a critical part of sharing what’s new in each release, and we want to rework how the marketing community and projects work together to make the release communications happen. 

Having multiple, repetetive demands to summarize "top features" during release time can be pestering and having to recollect the information each time isn't an effective use of time. Being asked to make polished, "press-friendly" messages out of release notes can feel too far outside of the PTL's focus areas or skills. At the same time, for technical content marketers, attempting to find the key features from release notes, ML posts, specs, Roadmap, etc., means interesting features are sometimes overlooked. Marketing teams don't have the latest on what features landed and with what caveats.

To address this gap, the Release team and Foundation marketing team propose collecting information as part of the release tagging process. Similar to the existing (unused) "highlights" field for an individual tag, we will collect some text in the deliverable file to provide highlights for the series (about 3 items). That text will then be used to build a landing page on release.openstack.org that shows the "key features" flagged by PTLs that marketing teams should be looking at during release communication times. The page will link to the release notes, so marketers can start there to gather additional information, eliminating repetitive asks of PTLs. The "pre selection" of features means marketers can spend more time diving into release note details and less sifting through them.

To supplement the written information, the marketing community is also going to work together to consolidate follow up questions and deliver them in "press corps" style (i.e. a single phone call to be asked questions from multiple parties vs. multiple phone calls from individuals).

We will provide more details about the implementation for the highlights page when that is ready, but want to gather feedback about both aspects of the plan early.

Thanks for your input,
Anne Bertucio and Sean McGinnis