Backlog to Spotlight

Every product team has committed to sharing monthly updates with customers. And every product team knows how that tends to go: the update shows up late, or it never shows up at all.

The process is brutal. Someone has to figure out what actually shipped last month. Then decide what matters enough to talk about. Then translate technical work into customer benefits. Then turn it into something polished and customer-friendly.

That’s a multi-hour process on a good month. On a bad month, it stretches into days, and by then the next month’s work is piling up.

Changebot solves this with two core features: Recaps and Spotlights. Here’s how they work.

Recaps: Your monthly update in 60 seconds

Need a weekly digest? Done. Monthly newsletter? Easy. Quarterly board deck? Recaps handle that too.

Instead of spending hours digging through Jira tickets and PR titles, Changebot scans your code history and generates a customer-ready recap automatically. It knows what shipped, understands the customer impact, and writes it in your brand voice.

What used to take hours (or days) now runs in about 60 seconds.

Why Recaps are the starting point for most teams

When new customers ask where to begin with Changebot, we almost always point them to Recaps. Here’s why:

You’ve already committed to this. Your team has probably promised monthly updates to customers, your board, or your internal stakeholders. That commitment exists regardless of whether you have time to fulfill it.

The bottleneck is research. The hardest part of a monthly update is uncovering what actually shipped, deciding what’s worth mentioning, and understanding the customer benefit of each change. Changebot handles the research so you can focus on the writing.

Consistency compounds. One monthly recap is nice. Twelve monthly recaps show customers you’re actively improving the product. That trail of progress builds trust in a way that sporadic announcements never will.

Spotlights: The narrative for major launches

While Recaps summarize the full picture, Spotlights zoom in on a single feature or improvement that deserves its own moment.

Spotlights tell stories. Where Recaps give you bullet points, Spotlights explain what the feature does, why it matters, and how customers benefit. They’re perfect for:

• Internal announcements: Get sales, support, and leadership up to speed before you go external.
• Customer communications: Share directly with customers who’ve been waiting for this feature.
• Marketing launches: Use as the foundation for blog posts, emails, and social content.

The key difference: Recaps are comprehensive summaries. Spotlights tell the story of work that deserves special attention.

The internal communication problem

Here’s something we’ve noticed across dozens of product teams: most companies aren’t sharing enough updates with customers because they’re not communicating well internally first.

Think about it. When sales, support, marketing, and leadership all know what’s shipping and how it benefits customers, looping in customers is easy. You just extend the conversation outward.

On the flip side, if your own team is fuzzy on what shipped last month, customer communication becomes almost impossible. You can’t tell customers what you don’t know yourself.

This is why Recaps work so well as a starting point. They serve your team first. When product, sales, and support all see the same recap, everyone speaks the same language. Customer updates become a natural extension of internal communication, not a separate (and often neglected) process.

How the two features work together

Most Changebot customers use both features in a rhythm:

1. Weekly or monthly Recaps keep everyone informed on the full scope of product changes. These go to internal stakeholders first, then to customers via changelog, email, or Slack.

2. Spotlights for major launches give important features the attention they deserve. These get shared internally to brief the team, then externally to customers and prospects.

The recap is the heartbeat. The spotlight is the celebration.

What this looks like in practice

Before Changebot: Product manager spends 4-6 hours at the end of each month pulling together an update. It’s always late. Half the team doesn’t see it. Customers get a watered-down version, if they get anything at all.

After Changebot: Recap generates in 60 seconds. PM reviews and makes light edits. Internal team sees it the same day. Customers get a polished update on schedule. When a major feature ships, a Spotlight goes out within hours, not weeks.

The backlog of “we should announce this” items? It stops growing. Because now you have a system that turns shipped work into customer-ready updates automatically.

That’s the shift, backlog to spotlight.