Proposal: Epic Stack Ranking - FY24 Q1/2

Summary

We have a clear plan for the rest of the quarter, working on enhancing the information that we provide to stage teams, providing support to dedicated and working on Redis. Beyond that, our priorities are less clear and we have a number of epics in triage. There is also an opportunity for us to greater understand and prioritise our technical debt

Over the next 1-2 weeks, we would like to conduct a prioritisation exercise with the team using the RICE framework to help us set a baseline for prioritising future work. This will be an async-first exercise using a scoring template that team members can complete when time allows.

Participation is optional, though we highly encourage everyone to get involved as this is an opportunity to provide input on what the team will work on over the next 6-12 months.

Couple of 3 min reads on RICE for anyone who's interested

• https://www.intercom.com/blog/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-managers/
• https://www.productplan.com/glossary/rice-scoring-model/

Instructions

1. Read about the RICE framework in the handbook
2. Watch this explainer video from Fabian and Nick where they walk through a scoring example.
3. Go to the Scalability RICE scoring spreadsheet. Find the tab with your name on it. This is where you'll enter your scores.
   • If you would like to suggest any additional epics for consideration, please comment in this issue and ping @swiskow / @lmcandrew / @rnienaber. Create the epic with a description if it doesn't exist already.
   • If there's not a sheet with your name on, please create one from the COPY ME* worksheet
4. For each epic in the scoring spreadsheet, choose a score for each RICE factor. The final RICE score should be automatically calculated in column F.
   • We understand that you may not feel comfortable scoring each factor for an epic. That's ok. There are no right or wrong answers. Just provide your best guess.
5. When you've finished scoring the epics, please share your spreadsheet with Sam and he will aggregate the scores to share with the team.

Epics for Scoring

• Error Budgets as a Performance Indicator ~"team::Projections"
• Enrich the Rails errors with endpoint information. ~"team::Projections"
• Use routing rules by default and deprecate queue selectors for self-managed ~"team::Frameworks"
• Provide stage groups with Redis instance usage information ~"team::Projections"
• Make Sidekiq SLIs explorable in the error budget for stage groups dashboard ~"team::Projections"
• Improve GraphQL SLI and include it in error budgets for stage groups ~"team::Projections"
• Horizontally Scale redis-cache using Redis Cluster ~"team::Frameworks"
• Sidekiq Zonal Clusters ~"team::Frameworks"
• Slices of services should be called shards ~"team::Projections"
• Alert stage groups to SLO violations ~"team::Projections"
• Rails metrics cardinality review ~"team::Projections"
• Functional Partitioning options to prevent Redis saturation ~"team::Frameworks"
• Automate levels 3/4/5 of the Service Maturity Model ~"team::Frameworks"
• Application optimizations for Sidekiq in Kubernetes ~"team::Frameworks"
• Customers Bypassing Rate-Limiting ~"team::Frameworks"
• Understand scaling concerns in Service::Mailroom ~"team::Frameworks"