@awthomas Happy to help! Want to join product operations office hours after the holidays to catch up on this as well as completing the related template?
@fseifoddini following up on our conversation in the Product Operations Office hours earlier this week, while it's top of mind, documenting some more details about the purpose of the Direction/Dogfooding Page as well as suggested next steps.
Problem to Solve
As categories mature, it can be difficult for stakeholders to understand the level of Dogfooding a particular category receives internally. While the Dogfooding board shows in-flight Dogfooding initiatives, it doesn't provide the full picture of the amount of internal usage for a particular category and historical context around past Dogfooding decisions. The purpose of the Direction/Dogfooding page is to provide a more holistic view for stakeholders to see what categories are actively being used in GitLab and to what extent. The page accomplishes this by assigning each category a Dogfooding status to denote the amount of internal usage, and a Dogfooding link for stakeholders to gain more context on how the category is being used presently or past Dogfooding decisions for the category.
Next Steps
As internal usage of categories changes over time we need a way to keep this page up to date. However, we want to be cognizant of not adding too many additional processes for PMs, and ideally we are able to keep this page automatically updated by tying into existing PM workflows around Dogfooding. Proposal:
If the PM specifies, dogfooding_status and dogfooding_link in categories.yml use these values to populate the respective columns on the page. If not filled, have the page automatically update the columns based on the following rules:
Dogfooding link: return a link to issues within gitlab-org project that have the Dogfooding label for the given category. Here's an example for the feature flags category
Dogfooding status: set the status to one of the following
None: Category has no associated Dogfooding issue
Limited: Category has maturity below complete and has at least one associated Dogfooding issue
Exclusive: Category is complete or above and has at least one associated Dogfooding issue
For Categories with Dogfooding status = none, reach out to the PM owner and have them either open a Dogfooding issue for their category (if applicable) or document why they decided not to go forward with Dogfooding (adding the link to the documentation using the dogfooding_link attribute).