Feature Friday - September 15: Sneak peek of new publishing permissions and a handful of quality-of-life improvements

Greetings, fellow Feature Friday enthusiasts! 

Over the summer we slowed the cadence of our Feature Friday announcements, but as we roll into Fall you can expect to see the pace pick back up over the next few months. We’ve got a lot of exciting updates on the way that will bring greater functionality and standardization to LaunchNotes' workflows and capabilities. So buckle up!

First up, as we all gear up for the weekend, we want to drop a sneak peek of something big that’s currently brewing in our development kitchen. Additionally, we wanted to share a couple of pesky bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements with you.

So, before you toggle into weekend mode, let’s take a look at what’s on tap and dive right in…

Sneak peek: publishing permissions

A powerful new feature that will roll out later this month: Publishing permissions for announcements, roadmap items, and ideas! With this feature, we'll introduce a more structured and standardized approach to product comms management for enterprise organizations - it’s the content and comms control product leaders want, without sacrificing the workflow efficiency and ease of use the teams on the front lines love and need.

Just a quick refresher: we’ve taken a three-step approach to build a publishing experience that standardizes the workflow and processes for enterprise-size organizations with large product teams, across multiple product lines:

• Streamlined announcements: simplify the process of creating and sharing updates - shipped July 26

• Publishing controls: selectively publish or unpublish (or “hide”) entire stages of your product roadmap - shipped August 15

• Permission-based publishing: publishing controls for announcements, roadmap items, and ideas - COMING SOON!

In summary, designated “Contributors” in LaunchNotes will maintain the ability to draft announcements, roadmap items, and ideas, but there will be the option to gate publishing for greater oversight and control of what content makes it to a public LaunchNotes page.

With publishing permissions, we’ll introduce a new role to the page and content management in LaunchNotes:  “Publishers” who, along with “Admin” will have the ability and authority to publish product comms once the content has been reviewed and approved. This level of control should ensure greater consistency and quality for all your product comms, across your announcements, roadmaps, and ideas. 

Publishing permissions should help streamline your product comms management process and provide the level of control and confidence you need in your organization's product communications before they reach your audience.

Fixes and improvements

Announcement headlines: When drafting an announcement with emojis in the headline, the emoji size increased significantly, causing a formatting disruption in the layout due to the aspect ratio being incorrect. This issue has been resolved, so please get back to some fun if you like to sprinkle emojis in your announcement headlines. 

Announcement hyperlinks: A UI issue was identified in the announcement editor -- adding a hyperlink caused the editor to automatically scroll, resulting in the linked text being positioned at the bottom of the page. This issue has been successfully fixed and resolved.

Slack Control: The LaunchNotes Slack Control "Add Feedback" functionality was not working as expected. This has been updated, and the issue resolved.

Announcement analytics: For a contained timeframe, email analytics for sent announcements were not functioning correctly. This issue has been resolved, and the accurate performance values have been restored.

RSS integrations: The RSS feed CTA was displayed on published roadmap items -- regardless of whether the RSS feed was enabled or set to private. This has been fixed and the issue has been resolved.

INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, October 3-4

We're excited to share some fantastic news with you! The LaunchNotes team will be in Cleveland, OH, from October 3-4 as a proud sponsor of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference hailed as the premier and largest independent product management event in the business. This conference promises to be a unique opportunity to explore the latest methodologies, tools, and frameworks used to build, launch, and scale exceptional software products.

For LaunchNotes subscribers, we’re over the moon to offer an exclusive 20% discount for INDUSTRY passes. If you're considering attending this event but haven't pulled the trigger yet, use our discount code, launchnotes20 when registering. We hope to see you there!

Let us know what you think!! 

Have some feedback? Drop us a line using the feedback submission form in this announcement. Have an idea for something we’re not working on that we should be? Leave us a feature request! 

Thank you for your time and for getting to this point! Have an amazing weekend!