The five rewrites problem
A VP of Product described her release process to us recently. Every two weeks, her team ships a release. Then the real work starts.
First, she goes through Jira ticket by ticket, copying and pasting items into internal release notes. Then she rewrites those notes for the support team, stripping out the technical jargon and adding the context they need to answer customer questions. Then she rewrites them again for the customer-facing help hub. Then again in marketing language for the product marketing lead. Then one more time as a summary for the weekly leadership deck.
Five rewrites of the same information. Every two weeks. With a team of two and a half people.
Crossing the border
Every time information passes between teams, it needs translation. Engineering speaks in pull requests and ticket IDs. Support needs to know which customers feel the impact and what to tell them. Marketing wants benefit-driven language. Leadership wants a summary of what matters strategically.
It’s like crossing borders in the EU — every border crossing means switching languages, even though the underlying information is the same. Only the packaging has to change.
Most teams treat this as a writing problem, but it’s not — it’s a throughput problem. The VP we spoke with isn’t slow at writing. She’s fast. The issue is that the same piece of information requires five separate passes, each with different context, different vocabulary, and different assumptions about what the reader already knows.
The compounding cost
If you ship once a quarter, five rewrites is annoying but manageable. If you ship every two weeks, it’s a recurring tax that never goes away. The VP put it plainly: “It does happen every two weeks, so it’s repeat pain.”
And the cost compounds in ways that aren’t obvious. When the support team doesn’t get their version fast enough, they ask publicly in Slack what shipped. Everyone sees it, the product team feels bad, and the support team looks uninformed. New hires on support are especially exposed because they don’t have the institutional context to figure it out themselves.
When marketing doesn’t get their version, product updates don’t make it into customer-facing channels. Customers don’t hear about fixes. Renewals get harder because there’s no visible proof of progress.
When leadership doesn’t get their version, they start scheduling more meetings to get caught up. Which takes time away from the person who’s already stretched thin doing all the rewrites.
Why internal tools don’t solve it
The teams we talk to have tried building their way out of this. The VP we spoke with has a Jira integration that pulls ticket data automatically. It saves time on step one. It doesn’t help with steps two through five.
The data extraction is the easy part. The context translation is the hard part. An MCP that pulls from Jira gives you the raw material, but it doesn’t know that “fixed null pointer exception in billing module” should become “resolved an issue where some invoices displayed incorrectly” for customers and “we fixed the billing display bug, you can notify customers who reported this” for support.
That translation requires product context, audience awareness, and judgment about what matters. It’s the thing that takes the most time and the thing that’s hardest to automate with general-purpose tools.
The real cost isn’t the writing
The VP told us something that stuck: “We want to do more, but we can’t get to it because we’re stretched so thin.”
The five rewrites problem doesn’t just cost time. It costs opportunity. Every hour spent translating the same information for different audiences is an hour not spent talking to customers, planning the next release, or doing the strategic work that a VP of Product should be doing.
The cruelest part is that the person doing all this work is almost always the person who cares the most about communication. They’re the ones who championed release notes in the first place. They’re the ones who insisted the support team should know what shipped. And now they’re the bottleneck for every bit of it.
At some point, working harder or writing faster stops being the answer. The real shift is recognizing that translating one piece of information into five outputs is a systems problem, not a writing problem. And systems problems need systems solutions.
If your team is rewriting the same updates for five different audiences every release cycle, let’s have a chat about how Changebot generates audience-specific versions from a single source of truth.
