After every Salesforce release, some portion of your support tickets are not defects. They are surprise: users hitting changed screens, automations behaving differently, processes nobody told them had moved.
A release log — one plain-language page describing what changed, who is affected, and what to do differently — is the cheapest support-ticket reduction program available to a Salesforce team.
What goes in it
Three columns, no jargon: what changed (in the user’s words, not the developer’s), who is affected (by role or team, named plainly), and what to do differently (the one action the user needs to take, if any).
Skip ticket numbers, deployment metadata, and internal component names. The release log is a communication artifact, not a change record — you already have a change record.
Publish before go-live, not after
A release log published after go-live is an apology. Published before, it is a briefing. Send it when the release clears its go/no-go gate — that timing also makes the log a natural gate criterion: no log, no go.
Who it protects
It protects users from surprise. It protects the support team from becoming the release communication channel — in one healthcare org, release governance plus a clean release log cut post-release ticket volume 20% and eliminated the week-long recovery period after each go-live.
And it protects the delivery team: when a change is questioned later, the log is the record that it was communicated, to whom, and when.
Keep it boring
The best release logs are repetitive, predictable, and slightly dull. Same format, same channel, same day of the cycle. Boring is what trust looks like in release communication.