Yext Product Release Cycle | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• How Yext releases new features
• How Hitchhikers can access features early
• How to use Ideas

Releases at Yext

As new features are rolled out, we update our training to ensure that you know how to get immediate value from them.

New Release Feature

See a callout like this in training? These indicate newly released features. We’ll give details on how to enable the new feature in your account, where applicable.

Find details on all our releases on the Releases page . Find this by clicking Docs in the top navigation and scrolling to the bottom of the page.

Each feature will also have a link to its own Community post under the Product Library and New Releases category, where you’ll find instructions for enabling that specific feature. You can also comment on these posts with any questions or feedback.

At Yext, we have two ways of releasing new features to users: Seasonal and Monthly Releases.

Seasonal Releases

Every Spring, Summer, and Fall we allow all Yext customer accounts 30 days of Early Access to try new features before we turn them on for everyone at General Availability. To use new features during Early Access, you’ll have to turn them on in your Yext account under Account Settings. You’ll learn more about how to do this in the Account Features unit in the Platform Basics track.

Monthly Releases

As power users, all Hitchhikers have access to Monthly Release features in addition to the Seasonal Releases. Every month, you’ll receive an email from us with information about all of the new features in that monthly release.

In the months when we’re announcing our Seasonal release, you’ll be directed to release notes (in our monthly email and in a popup on the site), which include all of the updates that launched since last season in addition to recently completed features.

Note: If you’re a Search customer, algorithm updates happen a little differently than with other features. Algorithm updates can be applied to your account continuously, monthly, or seasonally, with continuous updates being the default. Your choice will determine when the algorithm update goes live for your account.

How to Try Out Monthly Release Features

As a Hitchhiker, you have two ways to try Monthly Release features early:

1. Open a Hitchhikers challenge! Where applicable, we’ll update challenge environments to include the latest features as they’re announced.

2. Turn them on in your developer, playground, or production account. All new Monthly Release features will be settable in production, developer, and playground environments up until the General Availability date of the next Seasonal Release. If you need a refresher on how to create a playground account, head back to the How the Learning Platform Works unit.

Using Ideas

As always, we want to hear your questions and feedback on new features, and your ideas on how we can keep improving Yext. Ideas is a place for Hitchhikers to submit Yext feature requests and have their ideas reviewed directly by the Yext Product team.

Find Ideas under the Community tab in the top navigation menu.

You can use Ideas much the same way as the rest of the Community, as we covered in the previous unit . Upvoting is particularly important on the Ideas board, as this is how the Yext Product team will determine which feature requests are in highest demand by our users. You can also filter ideas by product Category and Status to see where it is in the development process.

When you add a new post to Ideas, we’ll automatically check for duplicates - rather than creating multiple similar posts, it’s best to upvote and comment on existing ones so that Yext Product Managers can see which ideas are getting the most traction.

The Yext Product team will review ideas on a regular basis and update them with each Monthly Release cycle. You’ll also earn Hitchhiker points for each idea you submit and comment you post, and for any upvotes on ideas you create. We’re excited to see what you come up with!