Ops & CI/CD PM Leadership Adjustment - Communication Plan

What

We will be adjusting the PM leadership team for the Ops and CI/CD Sections into having one leader covering the combined Ops Section which Verify, Package, Release, Configure & Monitor. This change only affects the Product Management function.

Here is the new org chart:

Kenny Johnston - Director of Product, Ops

  • Jason Yavorska - Director of Product, CI, Runner, Progressive Deliver & Package
    • Thao Yeager - Senior Product Manager, Verify:Continuous Integration
    • Darren Eastman - Senior Product Manager, Verify:Runner
    • Orit Golowinski - Senior Product Manager, Release:Progressive Delivery
    • Tim Rizzi - Senior Product Manager, Package
  • James Heimbuck - Senior Product Manager, Verify:Testing
  • Jackie Meshell - Senior Product Manager, Release:Release Management
  • Kevin Chu - Group Manager of Product, Configure & Monitor

    • Viktor Nagy - Senior Product Manager, Configure:System

    • Dov Hershkovitch - Senior Product Manager, Monitor:APM

    • Sarah Waldner - Senior Product Manager, Monitor:Health

FAQ

As an individual PM, are my responsibilities or scope changing?

No. You will keep the same stable counterparts, the same groups and the same scope.

I have a question or clarification that is stressing me out, what should I do?

Org changes can be stressful, and there are likely places where we haven't answered all questions. If you have a question don't hesitate to reach out to @kencjohnston (his cell phone number is in Slack). It's not worth you being stressed over a long evening or weekend to avoid the minor inconvenience of a non-work hours phone call. Honestly, anytime.

Why

As the product organization has grown we'd planned to create an additional layer of management in our Group Product Managers as reporting to Director+ PM Leadership. We've realized that in some stages our number of additional PMs and groups we plan to add in FY2021 does not require that structure. As a result we'll be consolidating the current CI/CD and Ops sections under one leader to more evenly spread the management burden amongst Product Leaders.

This also has the possible benefit of improving what was previously cross-section collaboration between Release and Configure - where we'd received feedback from external observers that we were danger of shipping our org chat.

Tasks

Pre-Announcement

  • Complete this issue including adding What and Why
  • Move this issue to a public project
  • Coordinate with Christopher L, Christie, Mek, Sam, Darby

Announcement Activity

  • Notify managerially impacted PM team members individually
  • Notify non managerially impacted PM team members in sections as a group (note, Ops section PMs are either aware or OoO week of 2020-03-02)
  • Notify current section stable counterparts
  • Post in PM Channel
  • X-Post in Company Announcements Channel
  • Highlight on Company Call

Post-Announcement

Post Official Merge of Ops and CI/CD in www-gitlab-com repo tasks

  • Update sections.yml to remove CI/CD and have Ops include Verify, Package and release - Adjust stable counterparts as needed - www-gitlab-com!42825 (merged)
  • GC scheduling combined with Ops with Kenny as DRI - www-gitlab-com!44106 (merged)
  • GC prep issues combined with Ops with Kenny as DRI - !72 (merged)
  • Adjust OKRs assignment at the Section level as needed
  • Combine direction pages - start with CI/CD and add in Configure and Monitor
Edited by Kenny Johnston