Ship, notify, changelog

Convo's whole reason to exist is the moment after the work is done: someone asked for a thing, the thing exists, and they hear about it. That is one status change away, and most of what follows it happens on its own.

This page covers what Convo does when an item ships, what it asks you, who hears about it, and how to see what you still owe.

The status change that matters

Every item carries one status: new, planned, in progress, shipped, or declined. Status is the source of truth — the public roadmap and the changelog are both derived from it — so shipping something is a status change, not a separate publishing step.

The loop keys off that status and off nothing else. No tracker has to agree, no integration has to be configured, and no tracker can move an item on your behalf — which is why a maker who keeps work in GitHub Issues, in a notebook, or in their head gets exactly the same loop as everyone else.

There are two ways an item reaches Shipped:

In the maker view. Press S on a row in the feed, or on the item's own page, and pick Shipped. On a phone, swipe the card.
From your assistant. The update_item_status tool, with the status set to shipped.

Both run the same code, so everything below happens the same way whichever one you used.

What happens on its own

The first time an item flips to Shipped — and only the first time — Convo writes the changelog entry for it. You do not open a form.

The entry links back to the item it closes. Its headline starts as the item's title.
It says who asked. The entry keeps the public display names of requesters who chose one, up to three of them, plus a total count of everyone attached to the item, and shows them as one quiet line under the headline: "Maya Chen, jdsmith and 1 other asked for this", or "3 people asked for this" when nobody picked a public name. Someone who never picked one is only ever counted, never named. That is the consent rule the rest of Convo follows: a private person stays a number. The acknowledgment reads the same on the public changelog and in your own Changelog view, because both render the same row.
The roadmap moves. The item leaves Planned or In progress and lands in Shipped, on the public page as well as in your own roadmap view. The public card reads "shipped 3 days ago" and offers a read the note link across to the changelog.
The item's own page shows Shipped, so anyone holding a link to that one conversation sees it without going anywhere else.

The public changelog is a ledger, not a blog: one line per shipped thing, newest first — the date, the item key, the headline, and the acknowledgment under it. The key links back to the conversation behind it. The context stays there rather than being restated in the entry.

Editing the entry

There is no draft state in the app. The entry is public from the moment it is written, which makes the headline the thing worth fixing: a title is optional when someone posts, so many are derived from the opening words of a note, and those rarely read well in a permanent record.

Open Changelog in the maker view and choose edit title on any row. The change applies everywhere at once — once an entry exists, the entry rather than the item owns the headline that both your Changelog view and the public changelog show. The rename is recorded in the item's history, so it is never a silent rewrite.

Your assistant can also compose an entry without publishing it. The draft_changelog_entry tool returns a headline, a body, and the acknowledgment for you to read, and only writes the entry when you tell it to publish.

The prompt

Flip an item to Shipped in the maker view and Convo asks you one question:

4 people asked for this.

Notify the ones who left a contact that "CSV export" is live? The changelog entry is already drafted.

There is a box for an optional personal note, and two choices: Notify them, or Not now. Nothing is sent without that click. Email delivery is still being finished, so today the click records who should hear and no mail leaves.

Choosing Not now costs you nothing. Open Changelog in the maker view and the most recent shipped item nobody has been told about carries a banner across the top — "CSV export just shipped", with a Notify & draft button that opens the same prompt.

Your assistant works under the same gate. The notify_people tool refuses to do anything unless the call carries an explicit confirmation, so an agent has to come back and ask you before a single message can go out. The rule is identical in the app, in the REST API and over MCP: nothing is sent without a deliberate go-ahead, and there is no setting that turns it off.

Who gets mail

Email delivery is being finished. Until then the prompt records who to notify and nothing is sent.

Here is what the send is, and will do once delivery is switched on.

Verified contacts only. A person qualifies when they climbed the identity ladder far enough to leave a real address — an email address they confirmed with a magic link, or a Google sign-in. Anyone still anonymous is skipped and reported back to you as "no verified contact", and Convo never guesses at an address.
Unsubscribes are honoured. Every message carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click with no sign-in, keyed to that one person. Once someone uses it, later notifications skip them for good.
It reads like a note from a maker. The subject names what shipped, the body says you asked for this and it just shipped, your optional note follows, and a link goes back to the item's own page — the conversation they started, not a marketing page.

Whatever the delivery state, the prompt tells you how many people it reached and how many it had to skip, each recipient is recorded on the item, and the item is stamped as notified. A Notified badge then appears on it in the feed, on the item's page, on the Shipped card in your roadmap, and on its Changelog row.

Notified is a one-way stamp

The item is stamped as notified when you use the prompt, whether or not anyone could actually be reached — an item where every requester was anonymous still comes back stamped, under a "no one had a verified contact to notify" message. The stamp is what takes the item off the Changelog banner and out of the shipped-but-unnotified list.

The app has no re-send. Once an item is stamped, the prompt will not offer it again.

What you still owe

Convo keeps a running answer to "who am I behind with", built from three things a maker can owe:

Shipped but not notified — the loop is half closed.
Stale promises — items that have sat in Planned or In progress for more than a month. Someone was told this was coming.
Replies owed — open threads where a person spoke last and is still waiting.

Two of the three are in the app. Shipped but not notified is the banner on the Changelog view, for the most recent item. Replies owed is a badge in the People view — "1 reply owed" beside anyone who spoke last on an open thread — and a Waiting on you list at the top of their record, one link per waiting conversation. Stale promises, and the whole-workspace report, are what your assistant reads: the who_needs_followup tool scans every product and returns all three lists. Asking for it at the start of a triage session — before adding anything new — is the habit the tool is built around.

Where to go next

Connect your AI assistant — the assistant that can run this loop end to end: read what is owed, flip the status, ask you about notifying, draft the entry.
The public page — what a requester actually sees when the roadmap moves and the changelog gains a line.

If none of that is set up yet, Getting started covers the workspace, the product, and the page that collects the feedback in the first place.