I created this process and now it's eating me alive
A VP of Product told us something on a call that made me wince.
“I did this to myself. When I started they didn’t even do release notes. And I, foolishly, said OF COURSE we should have release notes, our customers need to know!”
And she was right, they should of course have release notes. The problem is that years later, she’s still the one writing them!
Internal and external release notes at least every two weeks for five different audiences… delivered by a team of two and a half people.
The ownership trap
This happens in product organizations everywhere. Someone sees a gap, communication is bad, customers don’t know what shipped, and support gets blindsided every release. The most capable, most customer-focused person on the team raises their hand and says “we should fix this.”
They build a process. And the good news is that it works! The bad news is that people start depending on it, then the person who created it becomes permanently responsible for it.
Simply because they’re the one who knows how to do it, they care enough to do it well, and nobody else has volunteered to take it over.
Why it’s always the same person
The people who notice communication gaps tend to be the same people who understand both the technical and customer side of the product. They can read a Jira ticket and translate it into something a support rep can use. They know which bug fixes matter to customers and which ones are internal cleanup.
That combination of skills is rare. It’s also exactly why these people shouldn’t be spending their time on repetitive translation work. They should be talking to customers, shaping product direction, and doing the strategic work that requires their unique perspective.
Instead, they’re going through Jira one by one, rewriting the same information for internal teams, support, customers, marketing, and leadership. Every two weeks. Because the process depends on them.
The guilt feedback loop
Here’s what makes this especially hard to escape. The person who created the process feels responsible for it, so if they stop, communication breaks down. Support gets blindsided, customers don’t hear about fixes, and leadership asks what happened.
They keep doing it. Even as the team ships faster. Even as the release cadence tightens. Even as AI coding tools make engineering output 10x while the communication side stays manual.
The VP we spoke with said it plainly: “We want to do more, but we can’t get to it because we’re stretched so thin.”
It’s not a matter of being inefficient, it’s because they’re doing their work, plus the addition work of a system that should exist (but doesn’t.)
The process outgrows the person
The thing about championing good process is that when it works, it creates demand. Once support gets used to receiving release notes, they expect them. Once leadership gets their weekly summary, they depend on it. Once customers see updates in the help hub, the absence becomes conspicuous.
Each audience that starts receiving communication becomes a stakeholder who expects it to continue. The person who started with “we should have release notes” now has five audiences waiting for translated updates every two weeks.
This is a systems failure, not a personal one. The person identified a real need and filled it with manual effort. That was the right first step. The missing second step is recognizing when a manual process needs to become infrastructure.
When to stop being the system
If you’re the person who created the release communication process at your company, and you’re still the one running it months or years later, you’re not a writer. You’re a system.
The question isn’t whether the process should exist. It should. You were right about that. The question is whether a human should be the execution layer.
The signs are clear: the process takes the same time every cycle, the inputs are predictable (tickets, PRs, release scope), and the outputs follow a pattern (internal notes, support context, customer-facing language, marketing angles, leadership summary). That’s a system. It should run like one.
You did the hard part. You proved the value. Now let something else do the repetitive work so you can get back to the strategic work that only you can do.
If you built the release communication process at your company and you’re ready to stop being the bottleneck, let’s have a chat about how Changebot can take over the repetitive translation work.
