Release Notes Deck

About this template

When to use this

A 16-slide deck for explaining one release to people outside the team: a launch review, a customer update, a partner change notice. It answers what changed and why it matters, in order. It is not a running changelog and not an incident postmortem; for those, lift only the metric and chart slides from the back.

Layout and filling order

The deck runs cover, agenda, five divider-and-body pairs (slides 3 to 12), a comparison slide, key figures, a trend chart and a closing slide.

1. Replace the presenter placeholder on the cover with version and ship date. The metric slide already says v4.2, so use the same number – v4.2.0 on 2026-03-12 – or the two slides disagree.
2. The agenda on slide 2 has eight lines: release overview, new features, changed behaviour, fixed defects, upgrade steps, what arrives and what goes away, key figures, trend analysis. Delete any line that does not apply to this release and reorder if your story runs differently.
3. The five dividers (slides 3, 5, 7, 9, 11) and their body slides (4, 6, 8, 10, 12) already use the same wording as the first five agenda lines. The remaining three are the comparison slide 13, the metrics on slide 14 and the trend chart on slide 15, so all eight lines have a screen. If you change the wording, change the agenda, the divider and the body title together; and when a section does not apply, hide the whole pair rather than deleting it so the later slide numbers hold.
4. Each body slide is a lead line plus three items. Put what changed and the effect a user feels on the same line.

Example body lines

These are not in the file; they are examples of what to write.

• Example: new feature – automatic merge on concurrent edits, so the later save no longer wipes the earlier one.
• Example: improvement – dashboard first load down from 3.4s to 1.1s after moving to pre-aggregated queries.
• Example: migration – a status field is added to the order lookup response from 26 March; existing integrations keep working unchanged.

Metrics and chart

Slide 14 has four number cards (version v4.2, 6 new features, 41 defects fixed, 12 minutes to apply) with a note underneath saying the figures are internally counted. Keep the labels, change the numbers, and at most swap one card for rollbacks or post-release support tickets. Slide 15 is a four-bar chart rising from 28 at v3.9 through 37 and 52 to 70 at v4.2, which suits a metric that should grow; for one that should fall, such as open bugs, reverse both the values and the bar heights. Editing the numbers without resizing the shapes leaves the picture contradicting the figures.

Common mistakes

• Announcing the removals on slide 13 without calendar dates. “Legacy report screen ends in December”, “v1 API stops in six months” and “IE 11 support ends” only help once the actual cut-off is on the slide – and it should match the end-of-support line on slide 12.
• Packing seven changes onto a three-line slide.
• Listing internal ticket numbers; describe the screen or behaviour and keep the numbers in speaker notes.
• Ending slide 16 on thanks alone. It already carries a line telling people what to check before upgrading, so add the support channel and the rollback route under it.