Move Snippets to Source Code Management category and demote to a feature
Proposal
Move Snippets to Create:Source Code in order to rebalance categories across Create and pair it with more closely-aligned personas and JTBD. Demote it to a feature under the Source Code Management category in support of the organization wide effort to reduce and redefine categories to focus on depth instead of breadth.
Timing
We want to transition Snippets to Source code immediately. However, it is important to note that there is little investment currently in Snippets on a regular basis, and it would be fine to continue that pattern for a while. The feature is functional and stable.
More info
- Direction page
- Current maturity:
Complete
- Usage: ~40k snippets created per month, primarily on Self-managed
- Category strategy epic
Snippets as a feature stands up fairly well agains its nearest competitors like Gists, but needs some investment to bring it to Lovable
. The Editor group has not been able to focus on Snippets in the past 18 months beyond critical bug fixes and security issues.
The feature itself is built on top of a somewhat "hidden" git repository, allowing for up to 10 files to be stored in each snippet. The repository can be checked out locally or each individual file can be edited in the web UI. When edited in the browser, the underlying code editor is Source Editor, the shared code editing component. It is in this area that Snippets has received its only enhancements in recent history.
The editing of files in the browser is still something very closely aligned with Create:Editor (obviously) but the Snippets feature as a whole goes beyond the editing experience. In order to be truly lovable, we need to invest in better organization and search features, perhaps even a public marketplace. For the Editor group, there is potential to build functionality into other editing experiences that leverage snippets as a mechanism in which to reuse content, but Editor doesn't need to continue to own Snippets in order to make that happen.
Snippets would be more closely aligned with Source Code Management, given the similarities in the underlying structure.
Benefits
- Snippets and Source Code are targeting more similar personas and JTBD
- Source Code could more easily invest in features that bridge the gap between a code repository and creation of a shared snippet
- The experience of editing Snippets can continue to benefit from improvements to the underlying Source Editor, regardless of the category's owner
Drawbacks
- Source Code has a lot on their plate already. Snippets is not likely to move the needle for GitLab in any way that would outweigh continued investment in Source Code Management.
UPDATE: Source Code EM and PM are aligned with moving Snippets to Source Code. It will be a feature under the Source Code Management category. The feature set is lovable and does not require investment right now.
Average LOE
On average, Editor prioritizes very little Snippets work on a given milestone. Incoming security bugs have been the only significant development effort recently, usually related to HackerOne reports linked to upstream issues or dependencies. To maintain this, we could estimate one issue every 1-2 milestones. Otherwise, very little PM and UX time is required to maintain Snippets in its current state. There have been no customer escalations, very few active issues from Sales or Support, and very few community contributions to review.
Relevant links
- GitHub gists
- Current Backlog is 168 open issues
- Current Bugs is 15 with two being untriaged, one Sev2 (shared with all git repos and belongs to Source Code) and the rest being Sev3/4