Reorg product categories and features

We now have a canonical record of our product categories (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/) and a somewhat exhaustive list of features (https://about.gitlab.com/features/) controlled by features.yml and solutions.yml.

We should normalize these in various ways:

  1. There should be a single source of truth
  2. We should have yet another tier or organization to differentiate feature categories from feature details
  3. Features should be grouped by product category
  4. Much of the minutia should be hidden from the features page (but still available for comparisons)
  5. Adding to product categories and PMs to the data files would let us programmatically generate https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/

Proposal:

  • Stage (about 10) => Plan
  • Product category => Project management
  • Feature category => Issues
  • Feature (as in features.yml, lowest thing we compare or have docs for) => Assignees

Example: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZw5yPj1gGB-mwv_JS01QtIrxKH-S4ZmCLEqYHgKE2c/edit

Pros/cons/notes

  1. Stage works as a word for stages within the DevOps lifecycle, but works less well for other non-lifecycle groups. Alternatives: Phase, Subject, Area
  2. Solution is already used under the hood in the features page as a hangover from pre-lifecycle organization, but does seem like a reasonable word for our currently-named product categories, especially since these categories would be separate products at other companies.
  3. Renaming category to mean a feature category is likely to cause confusion, but we'll get over it.
  4. Hierarchies are valuable, but not perfect. When working through examples, it's not obvious that feature category is really the thing we want to be talking about while hiding feature details. Perhaps it's just "important features" vs "other features". e.g. features that product marketing want to highlight. Alternatives: Highlight, Speciality
  5. We also have a very high level split between Dev and Ops. I suppose we need a name for that too.
Edited by Mark Pundsack