Exploring Digital Product Release
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Digital Product Release
The ServiceNow® Digital Product Release (DPR) application streamlines the entire digital product and service release lifecycle, from planning to delivery. It supports release managers, product managers, and program managers in tracking release progress while ensuring adherence to organizational policies. DPR centralizes collaboration among stakeholders, providing end-to-end visibility on release status and automating key processes, including AI-driven generation of release notes from canonical release artifacts such as stories, incidents, and change records.
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Key Features
- Release Lifecycle Management: Plan, execute, and validate releases through defined phases and tasks, aligning with company policies to ensure compliance and readiness by target dates.
- Role-Focused Capabilities: Tailored functionalities for release managers (managing calendars, templates, and processes), product managers (defining products, scopes, and initiating releases), program managers (coordinating dependencies and approvals), and engineering leads (aligning development with releases).
- Release Templates and Policies: Use predefined templates containing phases, tasks, policies, and approval workflows to standardize and automate release execution.
- AI-Powered Release Notes: Automatically generate, edit, publish, and share release notes in PDF or link format, reducing manual documentation effort while enhancing clarity for stakeholders.
- Release Calendars and Schedules: Manage release readiness targets, change requests, blackout periods, and maintenance schedules to prevent conflicts and improve planning accuracy.
- Flexible Release Processes: Support for both timeline-oriented releases with fixed phase deadlines and stage-oriented releases with flexible phase progression and policy compliance.
- Integration with ServiceNow GRC: Connect release management with Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to align releases with enterprise risk and compliance controls for safer delivery.
- Custom Workflow and Dashboards: Build custom release workflows using flow actions in Workflow Studio and monitor release progress, risks, and software quality through dedicated dashboards.
- Holiday and Non-Working Day Awareness: Incorporate holiday schedules into release planning to accurately calculate phase durations and avoid scheduling conflicts.
Key Outcomes
- Optimized Release Management: Streamlined coordination and execution of digital product and service releases, reducing manual effort and improving compliance.
- Enhanced Visibility and Collaboration: Real-time tracking and communication across release teams and stakeholders to manage dependencies and status updates effectively.
- Improved Release Documentation: Automated, AI-generated release notes ensure consistent and clear communication to stakeholders.
- Risk Mitigation and Compliance: Integration with GRC and policy enforcement throughout the release lifecycle promote safer and more reliable releases.
- Flexible Planning and Execution: Support for different release methodologies (timeline-oriented and stage-oriented) allows adaptation to various team workflows and project requirements.
The ServiceNow® Digital Product Release application enables you to streamline the process of delivering digital products and services by managing the process from planning to delivery.
Digital Product Release overview
Digital Product Release (DPR) is a release management solution that helps release managers, product managers, and program managers manage the release process. They can track the progress of releases while ensuring that the releases adhere to the company's policies.
This solution automates processes that enable collaboration between stakeholders, so everyone can track release status, from start to finish.
DPR provides AI-driven capability to automate the creation of release notes for product and service releases. The release notes are automatically generated from canonical release artifacts—such as stories, problems, incidents, and change records. You can edit and publish the release notes, and then download them in PDF or share a link. For more information, see AI-powered release notes generation.
Digital Product Release Workflow
A digital product or service has a release life cycle that starts with planning, goes through development, and ends with delivery. There are many different phases to the release life cycle of a product or service, and each phase can have its own set of activities. The following infographic illustrates the life cycle of digital products and services.
- Create a product or service and add features, product enhancements, and releases.
- Plan the scope of a release by moving product enhancements into releases.
- Initiate a release and set its release readiness target date.
- Execute the release by tracking its progress and completing phases and tasks within each phase.
- Validate the release phase against mapped policies to ensure that the release adheres to organizational standards.
- Get the product or service ready by the specified target date to make it available for deployment.
Personas
| Release manager |
|
| Release coordinator or Program manager |
|
| Product manager |
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| Engineering lead |
|
Digital Product Release benefits
| Benefit | Feature | Users |
|---|---|---|
| Define release readiness targets for single or recurring release schedules. | Release readiness target | Release manager |
| Define release templates that include phases, tasks, policies, and approval tasks. | Release templates | Release manager or Release template admin |
| Create policies to automate the release process. | Policy administration | Release manager |
| Manage products, services, features, product enhancements, versions, and initiate a release. | Release planning | Product manager |
| Generate AI-powered release notes that streamline release documentation, reduces manual effort, and improves clarity for stakeholders. | Generate AI-powered release notes for a release | Product manager |
| Plan and manage the release process from start to finish. | Release execution | Release manager |
Digital Product Release key terms
- Approval definition
- An approval definition is a set of rules that specify how tasks will be approved from a set of stakeholders for a release. For example, the QA team might approve code quality or the Security team might approve on the security aspects. An approval for a task can be requested from an individual user or a user group.
- Included products
- Included products help you organize and manage related digital products and services. By creating a product hierarchy using Included products, you can understand the relationships between different products and services and make informed decisions about product management.
- Release bundle
- A release bundle helps you to group multiple releases to track and manage them concurrently from a single place. They also help you to identify dependencies and potential conflicts, and make any necessary adjustments to ensure a smooth and coordinated release process.
- Release calendar
- A release calendar helps you manage and track release readiness targets, releases, and change requests. You can toggle between viewing release readiness targets, releases, or change requests on the calendar using the filters.. The release calendar also contains
blackout, maintenance, and other user-defined schedules to avoid overlap of release targets on those dates.
These options on the release calendar give you a comprehensive overview of all events or activities scheduled for each date, improving release planning and traceability.
- Release execution
- Release execution is a continuous process to track and monitor the progress of a release. It helps you ensure that all products in the release are ready by the release readiness target date.
- Release readiness target
- A release readiness target is when a release is ready to be released. It helps release managers to determine the dates at which the products and services should be ready for deployment by the team.Note:Release readiness target and Release target are used interchangeably in the documentation and application. Both terms refer to the same concept - release readiness target date.
- Release template
- A release template is like a blueprint for a release process, which includes a predefined set of phases, tasks, policies, and approval tasks.
- Stage-oriented release
- A release that follows a stage-oriented process. This process doesn't have phases with predefined end dates. It’s suitable for teams that work toward completing product enhancements and objectives. Teams can move to the next phase after they have completed tasks and met policy compliance for the current phase. Teams have the flexibility to restart any completed phase if they encounter an issue that requires them to go back.
- Timeline-oriented release
- A release that follows a timeline-oriented process. This process has defined end dates for each phase of the release. It’s suitable for teams that work toward the planned deadlines and have phases with a specific duration.
- Release planning
- Release planning is an activity to plan a product or service's enhancements into releases to define the scope of work for each release.
The release must be associated with a release readiness target date, which determines the start and end dates for phases and tasks based on the target date.