Proof of Shipping: The New Table Stakes for Vendor Evaluation
An operations lead at a CRM company told us they needed Changebot for a simple reason: they needed a way to show “we’re alive and we’re still working on stuff” when prospects assess their product. Nobody had touched their changelog page in two or three years. They wanted to start fresh rather than draw attention to the gap.
If you look at the problem literally you’d have to say it’s a documentation problem, but the root issue is that you’re losing credibility.
The evaluation checkbox
Somewhere in the past few years, checking a vendor’s update history became a standard part of the buying process. Prospects don’t just look at your features page. They look at your changelog, your release notes, your recent updates. They want to see evidence that you’re actively building.
A savvy buyer will scroll through your last few months of updates before they even book a demo. If they see consistent, detailed product updates, they think: this team is shipping. This product is improving. This company invests in their product.
If they see a last update from 2024 or a changelog that someone abandoned months ago, they think: does anyone still maintain this product? Is this company even still around?
One product marketing leader described the downstream effect: customers and prospects say “I had no idea this exists” about features the team shipped and announced. The features were there. The proof wasn’t visible enough. When the proof isn’t there, the default assumption is that nothing is happening.
Investors want receipts
The scrutiny extends beyond prospects, private equity firms and VCs increasingly want to see detailed evidence of shipping velocity.
An AI strategy leader shared that PE-backed companies face rigorous tracking expectations. Investors want to know “every bit and piece” that the team has shipped, consistently. It’s not enough to say “we had a productive quarter.” They want the receipts: what shipped, when, and what it means for the product.
One founder described the investor skepticism that haunts every early-stage AI company: “Anyone could build this.” The counter-argument? A visible history of consistent, complex shipping. When an investor can see that you’ve pushed meaningful updates three times a week for the past year, the “anyone could build this” argument loses its teeth.
Proof of shipping is proof of execution. And execution is the one thing competitors can’t fake.
The stale changelog death spiral
Here’s what typically happens. A team launches a changelog with great intentions. The first few entries look detailed and polished. Then the person responsible gets pulled into a feature sprint. One month passes without an update. Then two. Then six.
By the time someone notices, the changelog has become an embarrassment rather than an asset. And the thought of backfilling six months of updates feels so overwhelming that the team decides to just… leave it.
Now you have a public page on your website that tells visitors your product is dead. Every day it sits there, it’s working against you. Prospects see it and move on. Competitors with active changelogs win the deal before you even know there was one.
The team we spoke with who had a two-to-three-year gap in their changelog chose to begin fresh rather than try to resurrect the old page. That’s a reasonable response, but it also confirms that years of product development went undocumented.
Shipping cadence as competitive moat
A steady stream of product updates does more than impress evaluators. It builds a narrative over time.
When a prospect scrolls through twelve months of consistent updates, they’re not just checking a box. They’re building confidence. They can see the trajectory of the product. They can see which areas get attention. They can see that the team responds to feedback and fixes issues quickly.
This is especially powerful in competitive evaluations. If a buyer is choosing between two similar products and one has a rich, detailed update history while the other has a marketing page and a pricing page, the product with visible shipping history wins. Every time.
One founder described it this way: showing a consistent shipping cadence is “how you get credit for what you’re doing.” Without it, all the engineering work is invisible. The product improves, but nobody sees it.
The feedback loop
Proof of shipping creates a virtuous cycle. Customers who see regular updates are more engaged. More engaged customers provide better feedback. Better feedback drives better product decisions. Better product decisions lead to more meaningful updates.
Teams that publish regularly also develop a sharper sense of what matters. When you have to describe every shipped change in customer terms, you start making different product decisions. You think about the customer benefit earlier in the process. You write better tickets. You scope features with communication in mind.
The companies that treat shipping visibility as a core practice, not an afterthought, end up building better products. The proof of shipping doesn’t just show what you’ve built. It shapes what you build next.
Table stakes, not nice-to-have
Five years ago, a changelog was a nice-to-have. A quarterly newsletter was enough. Customers didn’t expect to see a real-time feed of product improvements.
That’s changed. Prospects expect it. Investors demand it. Competitors are doing it. And LLMs are indexing it to decide who gets recommended to the next buyer who asks “which tool should I use?”
Proof of shipping has become table stakes. The question isn’t whether to maintain a visible shipping cadence. It’s whether you can sustain one without burning out the people responsible for creating it.
If you want to build a visible shipping cadence without the manual overhead, let’s have a chat about how Changebot automatically generates proof of shipping from your team’s actual code changes.
