OKR Tracking within Gitlab

Release notes

Problem to solve

Today organizations (including GitLab) use a myriad of tools to track OKRs across the organization. This can span spreadsheets, presentations, text files in repositories, and in some cases purpose-built tools. They often also have the challenge of tying the Objectives and Key Results into initiatives (sometimes features, or software changes) - this requires careful integration between toolchains.

Can GitLab extend its current product to support that job to be done and provide a compelling solution that meets the needs of organizations that have adopted OKRs?

Proposal

In order for GitLab to meet the demand for this category and provide a compelling solution, we'd likely need to meet "viable" maturity. Below are some capabilities broken into our traditional maturity levels (up to Complete) :

Minimal:

  • Ability to capture objectives.
    • Title
    • Description
    • Assignee
    • Labels
    • On track/Health: true, false
    • Status: Open/closed
    • Assigned to a time period (milestone)
  • Ability to "nest" objectives (9 levels deep. Epics are at 7).
  • Ability to view all objectives in a single place and drill down the hierarchy.

Viable <- GitLab adoption here

  • Ability to link existing issues to an objective. Linking an issue to an objective should not interfere with existing parent/child relationships with epics/sub-epics.
  • Ability to manually enter KR scoring and calculate rollups. <-- Can be parallelized
  • Ability to automatically track the scoring of an objective by linked issues (linear attribution based on open/closed for linked issues). <-- Can be parallelized
  • Supports mapping sub-objectives to multiple objectives
  • Additional Reporting
    • See all OKRs per assignee for a given time period <-- Can be parallelized

Complete:

  • Support for drilling down an objective into the individual contributor level (including 1:1 support)
  • Support for confidentiality and private objective (especially for IC KRs)
  • Support for the concept of "projects"
  • Close gaps to align to KPIs in SAFe 5.0

Intended users

Further details

For our initial implementation, we will be targeting R&D organizations that are already using GitLab. The goal will be to increase the number of stages, upgrade to Ultimate and increase the number of seats. Even if not every function within an organization is using GitLab to plan work and track business processes, there is an opportunity to bring value to R&D organizations that don't have an OKR tool yet or have not consolidated into a single tool.

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Usage: xMAU of OKR specific feature functionality. Ideally, we'd see wide instance adoption and heavy usage across all personas comparative to some of our higher user volume stages.

Revenue: Large portions of this functionality will be in Ultimate so we should see explicit interest from customers, and ideally begin to see us landing deals because of our offerings in this category.

What is the type of buyer?

Executive buyer

Proposal Validation with Internal Personas

  • David (VP Prod) - Completed Feb 3
  • Farnoosh (Product Ops) - Completed Feb 4
  • Michelle Gill (EM) - Completed Feb 7
  • Stella (CoS) - Scheduled Feb 22
  • Mek (VP Quality) - Scheduled Feb 21
  • Eric Johnson (CTO) -
  • Bryan Wise (VP of IT) -
  • Orit (GMP) -

References

This page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features, or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.

Edited by Melissa Ushakov