Let’s talk release management

I’m often working on ways to improve my own releases, and wanted to crowdsource some information - how do you do your releases?

Here’s how I do it:

There’s a repo on private gitlab server on how to release each product, along with deployment and staging guidelines, devops code in another repo
When you take on releases, you write an informative changelog, broadcast the upcoming release
Before the release goes live, there’s a devops freeze, preventing anyone from deploying to staging and production momentarily so we can test this RC
Upon approval, a third party will do a once over, and finally merge the changelog in, once the changelog is merged, the release is tagged, and CI kicks off building
Once we’ve built and distributed, we upgrade our production servers, this takes about 20 minutes in total
Devops freeze lifted on staging and dev, cycle over
Release manager documents what they did, how long it took, thoughts/ideas for next time, and commits this to the release management repo