Direction for driving PGMAU for Pipeline Authoring team
Background
The Pipeline authoring team was formed less than a year ago, we defined our goal:
making the authoring experience as easy as possible for both novice and advanced users alike
This is why when we build our first feature (pipeline editor) it was aimed at solving the problem for the single developer and was introduced as a free feature, over the course of the year we've extended our capabilities and gain significant user adoption, currently, we are at 200K unique users and our PGAMU is about 40K (both numbers per month)
Growth opportunities
CI/CD Variables
With the restructure of verify, variables were moved into the pipeline authoring team, we had an opportunity to look at this feature with a fresh set of eyes, we've identified several opportunities to improve our capabilities, and based on the UX research insights, we believe we can introduce a major enhancement around exposing variables in the UI.. We would like to pursue the opportunity of building this feature and add a tiering strategy where the exposed variables in our traditional pipeline and parent/child will be a free feature and variables for multi project pipeline would be a premium feature
Rational
- We know that Multi-project pipelines are also useful for larger products that require cross-project interdependencies, like those with a microservices architecture.
- We apply the same principle on pipeline graphs and our features by tier show that multi-project pipeline graphs are a top-cited driver for upgrades to Premium.
Based on buyer based tiering model and the lesson learned from multi-project pipeline graphs, this is a feature will be mainly used by teams and should be a Premium feature.
CI Template management
Based on our gitlab-org&6022 (closed) we've learned that CI templates are created and used in many ways depending on the type of users (single developer and large devops teams), both rely on templates and examples to build their pipelines. We also learned that:
- A Single Developers want a pipeline to just work so they can move on to shipping code.
- Organizations want the pipeline creation experience to be smooth, reliable, and fast as possible, ensuring compliance, workflow standardization and reliability.
This is why we believe that the template management which relates to the single developer experience should be a free feature, while template management for large organizations should be a premium feature
Rational
In large organizations, we typically see that a single group of engineers is responsible for maintaining CI templates in their organization that serves all engineers in their organization, based on buyer based tiering model all the related feature catering for that group of engineers should be a Premium feature.