What's New

Operationalizing release training through repeatable workflows, rapid production cycles, and scalable publishing practices. 

Context & Constraints

What’s New is a recurring release communication initiative supporting Oracle Construction Intelligence Cloud and, later, Textura Payment Management. The content is customer-facing, with lighter internal use by sales and support. Each release includes written feature descriptions and supporting images or short demonstration videos.

Release cadence varied by product: Construction Intelligence Cloud initially published monthly, later shifting to a bi-monthly cycle, while Textura Payment Management continues on a monthly schedule. A critical constraint was the development code freeze, which typically occurred two weeks before release. This left a narrow window to learn finalized features, draft and review written descriptions, script and record videos, capture imagery, and complete approval cycles—often without access to a fully stable environment.

In addition, release documentation carried legal requirements, meaning accuracy, completeness, and on-time delivery were non-negotiable.

The Core Problem

Release documentation had historically been owned by a documentation team and written in highly technical language. As ownership transitioned to the curriculum team, the challenge became redefining What’s New as more than a compliance artifact—transforming it into a user-centered communication that clearly explained how changes would affect customers.

At the same time, product complexity was increasing. Features were developed across multiple teams, and Jira tickets did not always reflect the full scope of what would appear in a release. For newer initiatives, such as previewing upcoming features still in development, there was often no functional environment available for recording demonstrations, further complicating delivery.

Design Goals

The primary goal was to ensure customers were clearly informed of any changes that would impact their workflows, prioritizing visible and high-impact features over exhaustive technical detail. Each feature description needed to stand alone, allowing users to understand changes without relying on images or videos.

A secondary goal was to improve clarity and accessibility by shifting the writing style away from developer-centric language toward plain, user-friendly explanations. As the initiative evolved, an additional goal emerged: exploring ways to preview upcoming features responsibly, even when tools and environments were incomplete.

Design Approach

My process began by reviewing all Jira tickets tagged for an upcoming release, which served as the initial source of truth for feature scope. To validate completeness, I attended internal and external webinars hosted by product management, where upcoming changes were discussed at a high level. This helped surface features that were not fully documented in Jira or required additional clarification.

From this information, I drafted written feature descriptions and sent them to product management for review and validation. All descriptions were written to be self-contained, ensuring users could understand the change even if they did not watch a video or view supporting images.

When video content was requested, I worked closely with product managers to obtain preview materials or access to development, QA, or UAT environments. In cases where only a QA environment was available, I developed workarounds—such as overlaying approved UAT screen recordings over QA data—to demonstrate functionality without exposing inaccurate or misleading information. Scripts, recordings, and edits were completed within tight timelines to meet release deadlines.

Key Design Decisions

• User-first writing: Feature descriptions were written in plain language, focusing on impact and usage rather than technical implementation.

• Stand-alone content: Written descriptions were designed to function independently of videos and images.

• Flexible production workflows: Recording strategies adapted to environment availability without compromising accuracy.

• Selective focus: Emphasis was placed on features customers would actually notice or need to act on.

Designing for Sustainability

As Oracle began sunsetting its legacy authoring tool, What’s New needed to be migrated to a new platform without disrupting active release schedules or losing access to historical content. Rather than treating this as a one-time content move, I approached the transition as an opportunity to design a more sustainable system for producing and maintaining release communications.

I led the migration of three years of What’s New content across four products—each year consisting of twelve monthly releases with an average of 15–20 feature pages per release—into Articulate Rise. During this process, I redesigned the layout and interaction patterns and created a documented style guide to ensure consistency, scalability, and ease of future updates.

This shift enabled faster content production, improved visual consistency across products, and reduced long-term maintenance risk by moving What’s New into a supported, flexible authoring environment.

Outcomes & Impact

What’s New is consistently delivered on the same day new features are released into customer environments, meeting both legal and organizational requirements. Engagement data shows that users interact most heavily with the content for the first several days after publication.

In one representative release, a single internal-facing video received 75 views prior to customer release; once published externally, the same video averaged 300 unique views over three days. These patterns reinforce the importance of clear, timely release communication at the moment of feature availability.

The redesigned and migrated What’s New experience became a durable foundation for ongoing release communication, supporting customer awareness, internal enablement, and future product growth without requiring repeated structural overhauls.