Making Every Release Count

UX Director & Lead Designer    |   Made at BigTime, 2024-25

The Team:
UX Direction & Lead Designer: Gretchen Nash
UX Designers: Jan Starzyk, Emily Lee, Bartosz Ujma
Product Writing & Education: Brian O’Donnell, Dalia Sadowska
CPO: Mark Johnson

Since early 2024, I have led the design and rollout of BigTime's first customer-facing Release Notes and Roadmap experience. This initiative required close collaboration across product, marketing, and engineering to deliver clear, trustworthy communication at scale.

Improving Customer Trust

Prior to this product, customers had no central place to track updates or access upcoming features. This gap reduced confidence, increased support tickets, and limited feature adoption. By launching a unified communication system, we aimed to improve trust, engagement, and proactive transparency.

Research & System Definition

I began with a competitive audit of best-in-class release note platforms, analyzing writing styles, categorization patterns, and delivery models. These insights helped shape a scalable framework tailored to BigTime's voice and product complexity.

Scaling Across 4 Product Lines

Release Updates includes content across BigTime, BigTime Foresight, Workrails CPQ, and BigTime Mobile. We established clear content workflows to ensure accuracy and alignment across our global team. Standardizing a shared tone and formatting structure improved clarity and ease of reading.

Challenges Solved:

• Navigating shifting roadmaps and timelines

• Aligning content across 4 product vericals and time zones

• Maintaining editorial consistency & tone of voice

• Streamlining a previously tedious & manual curation process

• Developing a lightweight email template system

• Change management communication for unpredictable shifts in releases

Leveraging AI Agents to Unify Tone

To improve consistency and support global collaboration, we developed AI Agents that assist in refining release notes:

• JIRA Translation Agent: Converts technical tickets into customer-friendly language, reducing discovery and drafting time by over 95%.

• Spotlight Agent: Helps product managers refine longer-form feature updates with consistent tone and structure, regardless of writing experience or native language.

Visual and Editorial System

I led the development of a modular template system with embedded logos, visual hierarchies, and standardized formatting for different content types:

• Spotlights: Feature highlights with summaries, visuals, and embedded learning links.
  

• Fixes and Improvements: Short entries focused on clarity and scanability.

Pairing Releases with Real-Time Education

In parallel, I oversaw the added integration of interactive demos and adding contextual help articles into release note spotlights. This ensures customers can immediately understand and engage with new features as soon as they are announced.

Outcomes:

• Improved customer confidence and product engagement

• A consistent release cadence (biweekly to monthly) aligned with product updates

• Expanded early access signups and reduced content creation overhead

• In-product education improved feature understanding at launch

Interactive Demos by Dalia Sadowska

Extension to Projector

With the success of BigTime Release Notes, in 2025 I led the extension of this system to BigTime's enterprise product, Projector. I defined scalable guidelines for layout, tone, and helped with team training to onboard other product managers to the content management & email notification platform, which is powered by Launch Notes.