Improve workflow for discussions in issues
Problem to solve
As Product Managers, we are daily dealing with issues that are being worked by engineers in the current cycle. It may happen that we have to focus on something most important and we are not able to immediately answer all the mentions immediately. This creates a backlog of mentions that we need to prioritize.
This may be critical when we're close to the feature freeze, where a hard deadline can determine if an entire feature will be shipped or not.
Before having discussions in issues, the flow I used was:
- go to the issue
- find my last comment (assuming it addressed all the mentions before that
- read through the comments added after my last one
- check if there is something I need to take care
- add a new comment
Now this is not possible anymore, because the top-down order is not the chronological order anymore. New comments can be in discussions at the very beginning of the issue. This forces me to go through all the list of comments again, to check for discussions that have new mentions.
This process is suboptimal and takes more than it was before.
There is a workaround for that. Use email notifications, that are reflecting the chronological order, to get the list of messages that need my attention. Anyway, this is prone to error, and still very time consuming and inefficient.
How can we improve this process and make our answers quicker and more effective in the very critical days around feature freeze? I
Target audience
- Parker, Product Manager, https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/roles-personas#parker-product-manager
Further details
In merge requests, we have very useful features like:
- resolve a discussion
- jump to unresolved discussion
These are not perfect, but still helping a lot in discussion management.
Proposal
Implement features to help discussion management for quick and effective answers.
Possible exaples:
- resolve a discussion
- jump to next unresolved discussion
- jump to next unresolved discussion where I was mentioned
- jump to next unresolved discussion I opened
- unthread discussions and sort all comments by chronological order (like email clients do)