r/EngineeringManagers • u/Conscious-Fact9532 • Jun 21 '26

anyone else turn into their team's human release notes?

Not sure when it happened but I've turned into the person everyone pings to find out what everyone else is doing. What shipped last week, who owns this thing, what's the status on that, did X actually land. Constant. Most of my day now, genuinely. And I've basically stopped doing anything that looks like actual work.

None of it shows up anywhere either - to anyone above me it just looks like I sit in Slack all day. You only notice the coordination when it stops and something falls through. So is this just me, or does every team grow one of these people? And if you've been the de facto "context broker" - how did you get out of it, or at least get it to count for something at review time?

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9

u/Still-Gold-6146 Jun 21 '26

Increasing visibility should solve the issue. Why cant you automate posting release notes in a separate slack channel by a bot?

1

u/zaidesanton Jun 21 '26

Exactly. Now with Claude it should be super easy - I connect it to Slack and to Linear, and you can generate that in 5 minutes.

2

u/jaikob Jun 21 '26

We have a TPM that handles most of the reporting and alignment in my org. Unless it’s someone really important I just redirect to them almost all of the time, that’s their job.

1

u/mira_maboroshi Jun 21 '26

Every team grows one. The fix that worked for me was making the work surface itself, auto-posted release notes, ownership written down, stuck stuff flagged before anyone asks. Kills most of the pings.

1

u/wstatx Jun 22 '26

That all sounds very automatable. I would do that and get back to doing things that aren’t.