Read time: 5.2 minutes

Hey there! Ceci here. Today’s newsletter is here to help ease any release-induced overwhelm you and your team may feel 🧘🏻‍♀️

Last Wednesday, Workday released their 2026R1 documentation on Community. So, in today’s newsletter, we’re breaking down the upcoming release!

What’s 2026R1 all about? And how does it actually impact (or NOT impact!) your Workday?

Release uncertainty makes things feel heavier than they are—so let’s unburden you with some 2026R1 demystification 😎

If you pull the 2026R1 Release Notes from Community today, you’ll find 451 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 2026R1’s 451 Release Notes broken out by type…

The majority of your release testing focuses on new Features.

Today, Features make up 72% of all 2026R1 Release Notes, however, this is likely to change over the next several weeks…

Workday adds Release Notes every Wednesday and Friday leading up to the release delivery date. Typically, the majority of Features are added to the Release Notes the day official documentation becomes available on Community (last Wednesday, January 28th).

Over the next few weeks, you can expect Workday to add a handful of Features and an onslaught of Fixes to its 2026R1 Release Notes.

Now, let’s dive deeper 🤿

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

Instead, Workday lists one or more sub-categories under a “Products” heading on each Release Note. Workday has used over 100 sub-categories in its 2026R1 categorization effort so far. Frankly, this level of specificity can make it difficult to understand which product area a Release Note actually impacts.

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

We don’t know about you, but this list makes us dizzy 😵‍💫

So, to help clarify and contextualize what’s included in 2026R1, we bucketed all 451 items into 19 broad, recognizable product areas…

A bit more digestible, right? It certainly helps us wrap our heads around the release more easily!

Using Well Built’s product categorization to more easily capture the essence of 2026R1 at a glance, here are the 2026R1 Features broken out by product area…

This view alone provides a great deal of demystification! 🌤️

Immediately, you can see, Workday focused most of its product development on Financials and Payroll. Together, these items make up 42% of all 2026R1 features revealed thus far.

Most importantly, with this view, you can also gauge what percentage of the features are relevant to your organization.

For instance, if you don’t use Financials or Payroll, you can remove 137 features (42% of all features so far!) from your test list.

Seeing features by product area also helps you gauge the workload your product area owners will bear. This release, your Financials and Payroll leads have a lot to get through! Meanwhile, the load is lighter for your Recruiting, Compensation, Benefits, Integration, and Talent leads.

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

For now, the majority of Release Notes across the board are Features. But we’ll warn ya—don’t get too attached to this view. It will change over the next several weeks as Workday publishes more Release Notes, the majority of which will be Fixes.

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 2026R1 👇

A slightly higher proportion of features are automatically available this release… which does mean a bit more upfront testing (more on this in a sec!).

Here’s how that breaks out within each product area…

Why does this matter?

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.

This view doesn’t just help you assess testing effort for each product area—it also helps you assess testing timeline. Based on the number of features that are automatically available versus require additional setup, how much time should product area owners budget for 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 2026R1 actually consists of!

A few weeks ago, we shared everything you need to know to prep your Workday tenants for the release. There’s still time to complete your round 1 checklist in PROD if you haven’t already—you’ve got until this Friday, February 6th!

🎁 Send us an email with the subject 2026R1, and we’ll send you Well Built’s (new and improved!) downloadable 2026R1 Feature Release Checklist Excel doc.

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

P.S. Loving the newsletter? Leave us a testimonial here 🥰