KR: Project planning & Portfolio management dogfoods iterations feature => 60%

(taken from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x7WZd_ilH9N4TvbUwdFKw2hcdlQ80SaN2CmHdNwnEzI/edit#)

We propose to take on a shared objective (https://about.gitlab.com/company/okrs/#shared-objectives) to use more of our Plan stage features in GitLab’s own agile planning process. We would start with the Plan stage itself, asking the people who are responsible for the features to implement their usage locally. Assuming success we might roll this our further across R&D (other stages) in a future iteration.

Retrospective

Good

• We chose a single, somewhat new feature to fully adopt within the Plan stage. Our focus was on ensuring we used the feature as opposed to making improvements on a feature to get to a minimally usable state.
• In that state, the process of managing iterations was very manual, yet for the individual KRs that branched off of this KR, we were able to achieve most goals.

Bad

• We didn’t ship additional features to iterations during the quarter so couldn’t measure their effect against the goal.
• We started planning the child OKR after the start of the quarter and didn’t come up with the actual goal until around halfway through.

Try

• Throughout this process, we determined things that we need as part of the iteration feature. Would have been good to explicitly define that as a KR: determine a prioritized list of feature improvements.
• This KR was focused on a single stage (Plan) dogfooding one of our new features. In the future (the working group is continuing beyond this KR) it would be good to push evangelizing the usage of the feature to the rest of the company.