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Design features with self-managed in mind over SaaS-first

Fabio Pitino requested to merge fp-design-self-managed-first-for-feature-parity into main

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TL;DR - Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers were missing out on how to design features appropriately for self-managed and SaaS solutions. This MR aims to add more guidance on how to support releasing to SaaS while planning for the demands of Self-managed customers.

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The SaaS-first principle can lead to some ambiguous interpretations where features are designed as SaaS only while they could be very valuable for self-managed. In essence this principle can undermine the feature parity between SaaS and self-managed principle.

If SaaS-first is more related to deploying features on SaaS-first, in order to give features to users faster and collect feedback, then let's make it clear and remove any ambiguity.

The principle about Feature parity between SaaS and self-managed can also be left to interpretations because we don't specify what design approach we recommend. We specify that eventually there should be feature parity. The reality is that some features today can be designed to solve SaaS-specific problems and never (fully) enabled on self-managed.

A random example: CI compute minutes was designed to be a SaaS feature but could be very valuable for self-managed and Dedicated customers. This feature partially works on self-managed.

  • Cost factors are configurable on SaaS but not on self-managed.
  • Requesting extra compute minutes could be a feature also enabled on self-managed. On SaaS that would be implemented as a self-service purchase, while on self-managed requests could be approved by admins.

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  • Design features with self-managed in mind

In order to achieve maximum feature parity between SaaS and self-managed, we cannot design features as SaaS-first. The SaaS-first principle has led to some ambiguous interpretations where features were designed as SaaS only while they could have been useful for self-managed.

Also, being Gitlab.com and Dedicated also a kind of self-managed installations, optimizing design and deployments for self-managed means that all other installations will get the benefits.

Edited by Jackie Porter

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