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Backlog Review to ensure Strategic Alignment

Context: Following the successful backlog cleanup completed by the Package team, we're following their systematic approach across all teams to ensure strategic alignment, eliminate unknowns with project tracking, and optimize where we are allocating our resources (time, effort, energy, long-term maintenance.)

What they did: Package had roughly 800 issues in their backlog and that they triaged as part of https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/558111+: They closed ~400 issues, categorized another ~400, and as a result of that + the additional alignment with the Instrumentation Audit across Core DevOps (gitlab-org/gitlab#547656 - closed) they were able to recommend discontinuing support (for Go and RPM registries) and increasing support (for Composer and Conan). This was an ideal result of these activities.

What we're asking of you

  1. Work through https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/558111+ to ultimately organize and categorize your next 12-18 month backlog in the way that makes sense for your domain based on customer feedback and strategic alignment to your roadmap
  2. Use the results from Instrumentation Audit across Core DevOps (gitlab-org/gitlab#547656 - closed) to understand the usage and user engagement of these areas
  3. Make Strategic Portfolio Decisions:
    • Recommend areas to Discontinue/Reduce: Identify features, products, or initiatives to sunset or deprioritize (include timeline/horizon)
    • Recommend areas to Maintain/Increase: Identify areas for continued or increased investment

Here is an example of the completed exercise (real numbers linked in the issue below):

  1. Actions Taken:
    1. Closed 387 issues - removed outdated, duplicated, or deprioritized requests
    2. Categorized 416 remaining issues into prospective work (363) and no-commitment items (53)
    3. Strategic portfolio decisions: Recommend discontinuing Go repository and RPM support (24-month horizon), while maintaining Composer and Conan (Finance and Automative customers) based on user engagement and investment progress
      1. Composer has a decent user base from instrumentation audit + user issues show interest although may be free tier

Teams to participate:

(Check off once complete)

Edited by Rutvik Shah