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Update Product Direction

Objective

Update Product Direction handbook page by Incorporate details from Product SKO presentation so Direction is SSOT for FY Product plan.

Direction section order

  1. Overview
  2. Guiding Principles
  3. Investment Themes
  4. DevSecOps Stages?
  5. Personas?
  6. Upcoming Releases

Tasks

  • Add an overview section with page purpose + summary of FY24 Direction + elements of direction + how Direction fits in Cadence
  • Focus the Direction page on next year by moving items not concerning next year to company-level pages with longer-term time horizons:
    • Consolidate vision on the company Vision page by moving over details from Direction vision section
    • Remove situation and strategic challenges sections; consolidate with strategy and mitigating concerns pages
    • Remove Product strategy by removing from Direction page and adding to other relevant pages
    • Fix broken links to vision, 3-year strategy, situation, strategic challenges, product strategy` sections
  • Add Product guiding principles to the Direction page
    • Change the name of Product Principles to avoid name clash
      • Fix broken links that break in repo
  • Remove reference to R&D investment
  • Add descriptions/rationale to FY24 Investment Themes
  • Move DevSecOps Stages and Personas after Guiding Principles and Investment Themes sections
  • Create a single roadmap view that is easily consumed by customers
  • Edit cadence page to mention Direction page only defined once per year
  • Move Mitigating Low-End Disruption section
  • Move/reduce Scope section
  • Move Mobile Strategy and ML/AI section
  • Move Your Contributions section
  • Move How we plan releases and Previous Releases - leave upcoming releases
  • Fix DevSecOps stages on direction page and in .yml including SEG
  • Share updates https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/#informing-team-members-about-the-changes

Merge Requests

  1. Add Overview section to Direction page
  2. Update direction cadence to one year on Cadence page
  3. Move Vision off Direction
  4. Move Situation and Strategic Challenges sections off Direction
  5. Move Product Strategy off Direction
  6. Move Mitigating Low-End Disruption section
  7. Move Scope off Direction
  8. Consolidate Releases sections
  9. Clean up ML/AI and cross-stage sections
  10. Rename Product Principles page

Already Merged ✅

  1. Add FY Guiding Principles section and condense ML/AI section ✅
  2. FY Investment Themes detail & links ✅
  3. Move DevSecOps Stages/Personas sections down and condense Contributions ✅
  4. Remove Mobile Strategy and SEG sections ✅
  5. Move cross-stage collaboration section ✅

Open Questions

  • single roadmap view or upcoming releases ?
  • Reference https://internal-handbook.gitlab.io/handbook/product/investment/ in investment section?
  • Where do DevSecOps Stages and Personas sections go?
  • Does the 2023 maturity goal need to be referenced still?
    • From Direction page "To ensure rapid progress, we have a 3-year goal to have 50% of our categories at lovable maturity by the end of 2023"
    • Strategy page mentions BIC in Strategy now
  • Separate Depth over breadth vs. Differentiate by pulling focus items
    • Are key areas in Depth over breadth different than key areas in Differentiate? *Depth over breadth = improving key areas to best-in-class focusing Differentiate on having all BIC items work seamlessly together to reinforce our primary point of differentiation
  • include We would also expect to automate handling of product usage data collection, GDPR compliance of data under management, cookie and privacy management, experimentation tools, A/B testing, etc. to Vision page?
  • Remove Stages per Organization and replace with something else? Like https://gitlab.com/gitlab-data/product-analytics/-/issues/982#note_1282380262
  • Keep the video? https://www.youtube.com/embed/yI29xFAgKoA
  • where to place these two items? Don't fit in SaaS principles and don't fit neatly in an investment theme. (removed from strategy section)
    • Offering GitLab-hosted services to self-managed customers to provide additional value that may not be feasible to deliver in a self-managed environment, e.g. automated cloud backups.
    • Offer as a different GitLab-hosted deployment option for single tenant customers and specific geographic regions to meet the regulatory, security and data residency requirements of various customer segments.
  • Keep and move content creation paragraph from Vision section on Direction page?
  • Add links for every example listed in FY24 Investment themes?
    • Should links be to epics or direction pages?
  • Determine performance indicator now as part of this or later as part of #5549 (closed) ?

Out of Scope, but Potential Later Iterations

Supporting Material

  1. Proposal
  2. SKO presentation
  3. Forrester Briefing DevSecOps Platform FY24
  4. [Release overview](https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-is-new-since/?tab=features
Edited by Ryan Wedmore