Your Commit Messages Were Never Meant for Customers
During an onboarding call with a software platform, we connected their GitHub and started processing their repositories. The engineer on the call warned us: “The commit messages are not the best.”
That turned out to be an understatement. We’re talking “fix,” “whoops,” and messages that would make HR uncomfortable. And this isn’t unusual. This is normal.
Every engineering team we’ve worked with has some version of this problem. Developers write commit messages for themselves, five minutes after the change. They’re breadcrumbs for debugging, and they fall apart as building blocks for customer communication.
The translation gap is enormous
Here’s what a commit message looks like: fix edge case in notification handler
Here’s what the customer needs to hear: “Notifications now reliably trigger for all account types, including teams using custom notification preferences.”
These are describing the same change. But one is useful to the person who wrote it, and the other is useful to the person who pays for the product.
Most teams know this gap exists. They just don’t have a good way to bridge it. They either ignore it entirely or assign someone to manually translate engineering work into customer language, a task that requires understanding both the codebase and the customer’s world.
Stale changelogs are worse than no changelog
One CRM company we onboarded had a public changelog page on their website. Nobody had updated it in two or three years. They preferred starting fresh rather than drawing attention to the gap.
This happens more often than you’d think. Teams launch a changelog with good intentions, keep it updated for a few months, and then the person responsible gets busy, the process breaks down, and suddenly your most recent update is from 2023.
A stale changelog actively hurts you. When a prospect is evaluating your product, they check the changelog to see if you’re actively developing. A two-year gap says “this product is dead” louder than no changelog at all.
The real cost: invisible features
The bigger problem isn’t embarrassing commit messages or stale changelogs. It’s that your customers don’t know what you’ve built for them.
A product lead at an enterprise software company told us: “We were always writing more software than any customer was finding out about.” They had customers cancel for missing features that actually existed. The features were there. The communication wasn’t.
A documentation strategist at a security tools company put it differently: “No one person has complete cross-functional knowledge” to translate engineering changes into customer-impact messaging. The engineer knows what changed. The product manager knows why the team prioritized it. The marketer knows how to frame it. But getting all three perspectives into one update? That’s where things fall apart.
Commit messages are a starting point, not the finish line
Better commit messages won’t solve this. Sure, descriptive commits help, but writing marketing copy isn’t an engineer’s job. Their job is to ship good code. Asking them to also be copywriters is adding a tax to the most productive part of your organization.
The fix is building a system that takes what developers are already producing, code changes, PRs, ticket context, and translates that into language your customers actually care about. Not “added an index to the database,” but “search results now load faster.”
This means understanding context that lives nowhere in a single commit: what the product does, who uses it, what they care about, and how this particular change makes their life better. It’s the kind of translation that requires knowing both the code and the customer.
Every shipped change is a story worth telling
Teams consistently underestimate which changes matter to customers. A “minor” bug fix might be the exact issue a customer has been complaining about for months. A performance improvement might be the reason a prospect picks you over a competitor.
When an engineer says “it’s such a small change, is it even worth publishing?” the answer is almost always yes. Not every change needs a blog post. But every change deserves a record, a summary, and discoverability, because you never know which change is the one that tips a buying decision or prevents a cancellation.
Your commit messages were never meant for customers. But the work behind those commits? That’s exactly what customers need to hear about.
If you’re tired of the gap between what your team ships and what your customers know about, let’s have a chat about how Changebot turns code changes into customer-ready updates without asking engineers to write better commit messages.
