Rework trials collaboration into conceptual ownership doc

Doug Stullrequested to merge
growth-trials-conceptual-ownership into main

What does this MR do?

Reworks the Growth trials collaboration page into a conceptual ownership doc for trials, and rescopes it to cover both GitLab (the application) and CustomersDot.

Renames customersdot-collaboration.md → trials-ownership.md ("Trials Ownership and Collaboration Framework") and adds a redirect from the old URL in layouts/index.redirects.

Key additions

  • Conceptual ownership model: entry points (Growth) vs. trial codebase (Fulfillment/Monetization). Within CustomersDot, the boundary is set at the thin trial entry endpoint + basic controller (Growth); everything deeper — trial creation, provisioning, entitlement, billing, lifecycle, shared services — is Fulfillment/Monetization.
  • Trial request lifecycle table: maps who owns each hop end to end (UI → submission → CDOT entry endpoint → creation/entitlement/provisioning → provisioning callback into GitLab → support), establishing that ownership follows function (entry vs. fulfillment), not the repository the code runs in.
  • Customer-state delineation: new prospect vs. existing paid customer trials.
  • Engineering excellence / sustaining ownership: observability, monitoring, performance, tech debt within the trial codebase owned by Fulfillment/Monetization.
  • Support & on-call: all CustomersDot operational support, incidents, and on-call remain with Fulfillment/Monetization — including the entry layer Growth may build or modify.
  • Unified Worked Examples: grouped by ownership outcome, pairing the call with concrete steps for engineers and PMs.

Inbound links updated

  • engineering/development/fulfillment/provision.md (2 links)
  • engineering/development/growth/_index.md (1 link)

Why

Trials have always spanned both GitLab and CustomersDot and serve both new prospects and existing paid customers. What has shifted is which team owns which part: ownership is now split across Growth and Fulfillment/Monetization, and the trial codebase is being centralized under Fulfillment/Monetization. This page makes those lines explicit.

Notes for reviewers

This is a Draft pending review of the ownership boundaries (entry-layer split and support ownership). Uses conceptual roles rather than specific future team names. The old URL is preserved via a redirect in layouts/index.redirects.

Edited by Doug Stull

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