Beta Program Communication

It’s finally time to lift the curtain on the new feature your team has been working on for months. But before you roll it out to all your customers, it makes sense to test it with a smaller group first. This way, you can iron out any kinks, fix those pesky bugs, and incorporate feedback that, in hindsight, seems so obvious.

But how do you communicate with those customers once they’re on board? How do they learn about new features added during the beta period? And what about known bugs or the status of the issues they reported?

We faced the same challenges with the beta of Released Roadmaps. Posting updates on the main changelog didn’t feel quite right since most people didn’t have access. Still, we wanted to keep our beta users in the loop about the progress we were making.

A couple of weeks ago we kicked off another beta. The Product Hub beta and it was the perfect opportunity—not just to test the Product Hub, but also to use it as a temporary communication channel for our beta users.

What is the Product Hub?

The new Product Hub in Released makes it a breeze to publish and share portals with stakeholders and customers.

These portals serve as a communication channel for a product, project, team, or even specific customers. Think of a portal as your dedicated space to curate and tailor your product communication for a particular audience.

Click here to see our live Product Hub.

Setting up a portal

Creating a new portal takes just a couple of minutes. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Released Dashboard: Click the blue “Create portal” button located in the top right corner of the screen.

2. Name Your Portal: Choose a clear and descriptive name for your portal that reflects its purpose.

3. Connect Your Jira Projects: Select the Jira projects you want to link to your portal. These projects will be included in your roadmap and changelog updates, so pick the ones that matter most.

4. Create Your Portal: Once you’ve made your selections, click “Create portal” to finalize everything.

Public or private

Our beta portal is listed on our Product Hub because there’s no reason to hide it. However, if you’re running a private beta and want to keep certain details under wraps, you can choose not to list your portal on the Product Hub overview page. Instead, you can share a secret direct link to the portal with your beta users.

In the coming weeks, we’ll also be adding permission settings. This will allow you to restrict access to specific users or customers from a certain domain.

Adjusting the look and feel

When communicating with customers, your brand is really important. Under the settings, you can easily adjust the design of the portal to match your product’s branding. This means you can change the logo, colors, titles, and descriptions displayed in the portal.

For our beta program, we decided to step away from our beloved purple brand color and opted for a more “construction” look with yellow and black. Honestly, I think it looks fantastic!

What do we communicate via the portal?

While our “official” release notes include bug fixes and improvements, we usually keep updates a bit more high-level. This is especially true for the roadmap, which only shows broader “Ideas” from our internal Jira Product Discovery project.

But the whole point of the beta is to gather detailed feedback and, in return, provide detailed updates on our progress. That’s why the roadmap items displayed in our beta portal include issues from our development project that are tied to the Epics related to the beta. We still choose not to publish very technical or detailed tasks that might not make sense to users, but overall, we share a lot more detail on this board.

Update frequency

Our regular release notes go out about once a week, which is pretty frequent. But for a beta that only runs a few weeks, that just isn’t enough.

Our goal is to show momentum, demonstrate that we’re listening, and highlight the rapid progress we’re making toward the public release. That’s why we’re publishing updates every couple of days. Users can subscribe to updates via email or simply check the Product Hub, where they can quickly see if there are any updates thanks to a handy red notification bubble.

The perfect communication channel

We didn’t really think about temporary communication channels when we were building the Product Hub. But being able to set up a new channel in just seconds and share it with beta users has turned out to be super powerful. The feedback from users has been amazing—not just about the frequent communication, but also because they love the idea and want to use it for their own portals.

Want to set up your own Product Hub? Try out Released today.