Amazon did a great job with that technique and we were inspired a lot by that. Of course companies/startups do less "press-releases" these days, so we adopted it to blogging.

The content of published articles does help not only with team focus, but also is a natural "deliverable" definition for UI-less products such as SDK. Blog post simply cannot be published unless code is in the Github repo, tutorials and sample apps are there as well as illustrations and narration communicating new features.