Split Distribution into two groups
Approvals
Why is this change being made?
This MR is to introduce the new groups for distribution, including charters and examples team tasks.
The management capacity has become the bottleneck to scale Enablement, and Distribution is one of the teams in Enablement with the highest ratio (1:9). We’ve been focusing on growing engineering capacity over the past 2 years to fulfill the product growth and increase the throughput, however the side effect is that Enablement average EM:IC ratio has come to an unsustainable level at 1:8+ and keeps going up if we continue the same pattern. As a reference, most other engineering sub-departments’ average ratio is 1:4~5.
Alongside adding room for team growth, it’s also necessary to create more career growth opportunities while following the Staff+ IC gearing ratio.
This split also prepares Distribution for growth in the future. Distribution is responsible for many distribution types (CNG, Omnibus, Ironbank, Marketplaces, etc.) and additional opportunities continue to arise. Splitting the team will allow the team to grow to support these potential projects in the future.
What
We will move forward with the proposal to have a Distribution:Build team and a Distribution:Deploy team. These are based on the seperation identified by @rmarshall in his Logicsics and Deployment suggestion.
Why
The proposed seperation does align well with the work Distribution is currently doing, and both groups should have large enough chunks of the existing backlog. There is currently clear Product roadmap work for both, and a survey of the team showed that there was a strong desire for the Build team, and that we could evenly staff both teams using the Team members own preferences.
Future
Distribution leads were aligned on the need for additional work to be done in the 'Operate' focus of Distribution, and that having 3 teams: Build, Deploy, and Operate, may be a future iteration. In the near future we will be looking to see if upcoming Direction items necessiate the need for the 3rd team in the upcoming year.
The discussion issue can be found here - gitlab-org/distribution/team-tasks#936 (closed)
Specific discussion for Build and Deploy here - gitlab-org/distribution/team-tasks#936 (comment 710951374)
Original proposal of Logistics and Deploy and choice of Build name over logistics name - gitlab-org/distribution/team-tasks#936 (comment 704304705)
Author Checklist
-
Provided a concise title for the MR -
Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per say-why-not-just-what - Copy/paste the Slack conversation to document it for later, or upload screenshots. Verify that no confidential data is added.
-
Assign reviewers for this change to the correct DRI(s) - If the DRI for the page/s being updated isn’t immediately clear, then assign it to one of the people listed in the "Maintained by" section in on the page being edited.
- If your manager does not have merge rights, please ask someone to merge it AFTER it has been approved by your manager in #mr-buddies.
-
If the changes affect team members, or warrant an announcement in another way, please consider posting an update in #whats-happening-at-gitlab linking to this MR. - If this is a change that directly impacts the majority of global team members, it should be a candidate for #company-fyi. Please work with internal communications and check the handbook for examples.