Waves: Product Updates People Wait For
I made Windsurf's product updates something people looked forward to.
Tiger Souvannakoumane
Product Marketing Lead, Windsurf
I made Windsurf's product updates something people looked forward to.
I led the Waves announcement videos, Windsurf’s recurring product update series. As product engineering continued to update and expand our agentic code editor, I became the bridge between the engineers building each feature and the developers who needed to understand it: not just get excited about it, but understand the value. Because the video came out first, before social, press, enterprise updates, and email newsletters, it had to be trustworthy, credible, and accurate. Those other channels were built on top of it.
Challenge
Windsurf shipped constantly, and I had to prove we were building at the forefront of an entirely new kind of software, not just moving fast.
Windsurf was shipping constantly, building the first agentic code editor in the world. Developers needed to believe two things at once: that we shipped fast and took feedback seriously, and that we were building at the frontier, not bolting AI onto a legacy tool. Waves went out every two to three weeks, and the product could still be changing right up until launch. Start too early and the story would be outdated. Wait too long and there wouldn’t be time to shoot, edit, and get it out the door.
Solution
It came down to three things: shipping consistently, keeping the content digestible, and being the bridge between the engineers building Windsurf and the developers who needed to understand it.
It came down to three things: shipping consistently, keeping the content digestible, and being the bridge between the engineers building Windsurf and the developers who needed to understand it. I worked directly with engineers on each feature to learn not just how it worked, but why it mattered to a developer’s workflow, then translated that into Wave content. Featuring the actual engineers on camera protected technical accuracy and gave developers a credible voice instead of a marketing one. If something changed right before a shoot, an engineer could update the teleprompter script themselves and we’d still ship on time. I leaned on the Windsurf studio and content system I’d built to stay adaptable, and over time that system also became a visual identity, evolving from meeting-room shoots into a recognizable, branded Windsurf universe that made each Wave instantly legible.
Result
Waves became something the audience waited for, not just watched.
The Wave video became a repeatable moment people started to anticipate rather than passively receive. People referenced the latest Wave at conferences, recognized teaser language like wave emojis or ‘tsunami coming soon,’ and asked when the next Wave was coming if the release cadence stretched too long. The videos reached roughly 100K-200K impressions on X, where developers lived. Paired with a strong, consistent visual identity, each Wave became instantly recognizable and stood out in the feed. State-of-the-art features, a release cadence people could set their watch to, and real engineers on camera: that combination is what turned a product update into something people waited for.
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