Encourage customer involvement in feature request issues
Problem
Customer requirements, priorities, and desired results can be difficult for Support to assess and communicate in feature request issues.
Context
GitLab provides customers (and users) with a direct path to raise problems, voice concerns, make feature requests, or communicate impact and priority of issues.
After an issue is made, Support has workflows in place to prioritize and escalate the issue and get others involved.
GitLab has "everyone can contribute" as our company mission.
This gives customers (or community users) an actionable path to raise and prioritize issues with product managers, engineers, developers.
Part of interning for learning outcomes with Community Advocacy team. doc
Why?
For feature requests issues in particular:
- Nobody is better equipped to evaluate customer results and impact than customers themselves.
- Issues created by customers directly can better elaborate on their problems better than Support can.
- Customers usually understand their own internal needs and workflows better than Support team members.
- Having issues created or contributed to by customers directly helps product managers prioritize and triage. The feedback is direct.
- Using issues is the best way for Support to help with problems or situations where a fix or workaround is not currently known or available.
Benefits
Customers feel empowered to create and contribute to feature requests.
Proposal
Add handbook entry for sharing benefits of customer involvement in feature request issues.
Support can link to it in situations where the customer has an active GitLab.com account and might be receptive to creating (or commenting on) a feature-request
issue.
Zero change to the workflow for any customers lacking active GitLab.com accounts or time/capacity/ability to contribute.
TODO:
-
braindump in issue description -
find #1311 (closed), re-think the whole thing -
re-formulate thoughts, rename issue title -
clean up issue description (remove (some) bias, make it actionable) -
sleep on it 🛌 (2 night minimum), listen for feedback -
move to Merge Request: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!44703 (merged)