This season’s final data and analysis refreshed as of March 21, 2025.

Read time: 5 minutes

Hey, there! Something exciting happened on Wednesday, January 29th…

Workday released their 2025R1 documentation on Community 😎

Which means we can really start digging into this Feature Release.

So, what’s 2025R1 all about!? And how does it impact your Workday?

Uncertainty about what’s coming can feel heavy—like carrying an extra pile of bricks on top of your hefty pile of day-to-day duties 😮‍💨

A high-level understanding of what 2025R1 includes goes a long way to ease any release-induced overwhelm you and your team may feel.

This is why we’re sharing a bird’s-eye view analysis of what’s inside Workday’s 2025 Release 1!

And, we’ll update this analysis every week to reflect the latest and greatest Release Note stats, until the release has been delivered on March 15th.

We’ve got you covered 🙌 So let’s dive in, shall we!?

If you pull the 2025R1 Release Notes from Community today, you’ll find 1,074 items consisting of Features, Fixes, Retirements, and Coming Soon notes.

Workday buckets each Release Note into 1 of the 4 following “Release Note Types”…

Here are 2025R1’s 1,074 Release Notes broken out by type…

The majority of your release testing focuses on new features.

However, as of March 21st, fixes overtook features, making up 53% of all 2025R1 Release Notes. This is typical as release season wraps up. Now, just 43% of all Release Notes are features.

Last release (2024R2), by the release delivery date, the Release Notes included close to 450 features alone, and well over 500 fixes. We can now see that 2025R1 delivered a similar breakdown!

Now, let’s dive deeper into 2025R1…

Workday’s Release Notes don’t categorize items by broad product areas that most of us are familiar with…

Instead, Workday lists one or more sub-products under a “Products” heading on each Release Note. Workday uses a whopping 108 sub-products for this categorization effort—this level of specificity can make it difficult to understand which product area a Release Note impacts.

In case you were curious 😜 Here’s how Workday categorizes Release Notes using its product and sub-product groupings…

We don’t know about you, but this list makes our heads spin 😵‍💫

So, to help clarify and contextualize what’s included in 2025R1, we bucketed all 1,074 items into 19 broad, recognizable product areas…

What do you think? More easily digestible? That was our goal 😎

Using Well Built’s product categorization to more easily capture the essence of 2025R1 at a glance, here are the results for 2025R1’s 463 features broken out by product area…

This view really helps demystify the release…

Immediately, you can see, similar to 2024R2, Workday focused most of its product development on the Financials, Student, and Payroll products areas. Together, these items make up nearly HALF (44%) of all 2025R1 features.

With this view, you can also gauge what percentage of the features are relevant to your organization. For instance, if you don’t use Workday Student, you can remove 58 features (12.5% of all features!) from your test list.

Seeing features by product area also helps you gauge the workload your product area owners will bear during testing. This release, your Financials team has a lot to get through! Meanwhile, it’s an easy, breezy release for your Benefits lead.

Zooming out a bit, we also took a look at the breakdown of Release Note types within each product area…

At the end of this release season, Financial Management tops the charts, ranking #1 for 2025R1 Release Notes (just barely beating out Student).

Here’s an isolated look at 2025R1’s 574 fixes by product area…

This may be the most important release feature variable to assess…

Setup effort! Does the feature require setup or opt-in, or is it automatically available? Here’s the breakdown so far for 2025R1 👇

Sweet! Almost two-thirds of features thus far are automatically available. Just over one-third require setup or opt-in, and just 4 features require you to request professional services support for setup.

Here’s one last visualization to conclude today’s summary of the release…

With this chart, you’ve got eyes on exactly how many features require setup or opt-in within each product area.

Setup effort impacts your testing strategy. If a feature is automatically available, testing is a higher priority since you can’t control if/when it goes into Production. When a feature requires setup or opt-in, you have leeway to tailor test prioritization to your organization.

Not only does this view help you gauge testing effort for each product area, but also testing timeline. Based on the number of features that are automatically available versus require additional setup, how should each product area owner plan for and space out their testing?

📊 📊 📊

Seeing the release summarized and broken down from these different angles helps us wrap our heads around where Workday is taking its products—and consequently, where Workday is taking all of us.

We hope this analysis was both fun and interesting, and gives you and your team a solid understanding of what 2025R1 actually consists of!

In next week’s newsletter, we’ll dive deeper into some 2025R1 features. Stay tuned! 💃🏻

A few weeks ago, we shared everything you need to know to prep your Workday tenants for the release.

Send us an email at [email protected] with the subject 2025R1, and we’ll send you Well Built’s downloadable Feature Release Checklist Excel doc to help you check these checklists off your to-do list asap 🤗

Or, you can also find Workday’s version of the checklist buried at the bottom of this Community page.

As always, thank you for being a reader!

We’re celebrating you and your pursuit of a Well Built Workday 🥳

Until next time!

Mia & Ceci

Co-Founders of Well Built Solutions

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