Use Calendar Instead of Fiscal Year on Public Documents
Current Status
We currently use Fiscal Year (FY) to denote time periods on artifacts designed for audiences outside of GitLab such as the direction page, milestones, and elsewhere such as slide decks. We used these for efficiency because they align to dates we use elsewhere for internal purposes such as OKRs so when we talk about dates internally we don't need to translate.
Problem
External audiences are not familiar with how we define our fiscal year. Fiscal years also vary from company to company with no standard. Without linking to our definition of FY every time we use it there's no way for an external audience to know or even try to reason about when our FY starts or ends.
It is also confusion to any users who are unfamiliar with the concept of a fiscal year and how it differs from a calendar year.
Proposal
We should use calendar year (CY) for quarters or dates on any artifacts intended for external consumption, which would include our marketing site, slide decks, and issue milestones.
It will be easier to train ~500 folks internally to translate between FY & CY than it will be to try to continually communicate to all external parties and prospects our definition of FY and how to translate.
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Add a statement to the handbook about using CY on external assets https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/#communicating-dates -
Rename milestones (should auto-update the direction page) -
Update slides -
Communicate broadly (team call) about the change