Release Notes Skill

A Claude skill that turns raw engineering notes into clean, audience-correct release notes and launch comms — classified (New / Improved / Fixed / Deprecated), written separately for the audiences that diverge (admin, end user, developer), in a plain-verbs no-hype voice matched to your product's terminology. Anything the source notes don't establish goes back to engineering as a question — never forward to customers as a guess.

Distilled from owning technical writing for a product's most technical surfaces — endpoint agent, admin console, automation engine, and public API — where release notes shipped ahead of schedule.

What it does

• Classifies every change: New / Improved / Fixed / Deprecated — breaking changes always lead
• Writes per-audience variants where meanings diverge: the same change reads differently to an admin, an end user, and a developer
• Enforces the voice: what changed and why it matters, plain verbs, present tense, no marketing adjectives, no exclamation points
• Matches your terminology — feed it past notes or a glossary and it follows your docs' vocabulary
• Bounces ambiguity back: "improved sync performance" returns as a question to engineering, not a guess in front of customers
• Channel variants on request: changelog, customer email, in-app announcement — same facts, different compression

Why the ambiguity rule matters

A wrong release note is a support-ticket generator. The skill's core discipline is refusing to publish behavior the source notes don't establish — the questions list it returns is engineering's five-minute task, and it is cheaper than a week of confused customers.

When it triggers

Phrases like:

• "Write release notes from these eng notes"
• "Turn these tickets into a changelog"
• "Draft the launch comms for this feature"
• "Admin notes and end-user notes for this release"

Installation

Option A — Claude.ai (no command line — where most marketers work)

1. Download release-notes-skill.skill from this repo (top level, one click).
2. In claude.ai, open Settings → Capabilities, find Skills, and upload the file.
3. Done — next time you ask for the job, the skill runs.

Option B — Claude Code (if you work in the terminal)

Copy the skill folder into your Claude skills directory:

# Personal (all projects)
cp -r release-notes-skill ~/.claude/skills/

# Or project-scoped
cp -r release-notes-skill /path/to/project/.claude/skills/

Restart Claude Code (or start a new session) and the skill will be available.

Usage

Paste the raw notes and name the audience:

Write release notes from these eng notes. Audiences: admins and end users. Past notes for voice: [paste or attach].

See examples/ for a worked input and output (invented, illustrative data), including an ambiguous item bounced back as a question.

Repository contents

• release-notes-skill/SKILL.md — the skill
• examples/ — worked example (illustrative, invented data)
• release-notes-skill.skill — packaged for upload

Part of the PMM Skill Stack

One of four free Claude Skills for product marketers: cmoconfessions.com/skills. Built by Daniel Glickman — product marketing and AI leader.