How Courier made “Is there a LaunchNote for this?” part of every release
Courier is a customer messaging and notification platform that helps companies orchestrate communications across email, SMS, push, chat, in-app, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. It enables teams and AI agents to create personalized notifications and customer-engagement journeys.
Courier used LaunchNotes to bring product, engineering and customer success into one release process, and to build trust with a developer audience that wants to know what's being built and why.
The situation
Courier builds notification infrastructure that helps companies orchestrate messages across email, SMS, push, chat, in-app, Slack and Microsoft Teams. It closed a $10M Series A in September 2020 and grew quickly.
As the team and customer base grew, Nate Munger, Head of Customer Success, needed a real release process. Courier's changelog was “super lightweight and wasn’t doing much for us,” he said. He wanted more structure, a roadmap users could see, and something customizable to match the brand.
Why LaunchNotes
Courier needed one tool that both technical and non-technical teams would actually adopt. For an engineering-first company selling to engineers, transparency about what's being built, how and why wasn't optional.
How they use it
- A shared release workflow: product and engineering own the Planning and In Development stages; customer success announces, then confirms docs and web pages are ready before marking an item Complete
- A public roadmap at least a quarter out, to build anticipation before launch day
- Categories so users only hear about what they subscribed to
- Everywhere customers look: the LaunchNotes page is linked from the newsletter, docs and website, plus the in-app widget
- Live events: Courier once turned its LaunchNotes page into a livestream to walk through three items in development
What changed
LaunchNotes became part of how the company talks about releases. “People will ask: ‘Is this ready for LaunchNotes?’ or ‘Is there a LaunchNote for this?’ It’s a natural part of our process,” Nate said.
Sharing the roadmap early also brought more people to new features. “The roadmap helps us drive valuable conversations about what we’re working on with customers, which ultimately drives more people to try things on launch day.”
Closing thought
The value that LaunchNotes provides aligns perfectly with the culture we’re trying to build at Courier. We’re proactive, transparent, and we want to build a strong community.
Nate Munger, Head of Customer Success, Courier
