Transition Dedicated/Switchboard TW assignment to Lysanne Pinto

• Stage/group being transitioned: devopsplatforms / groupdedicated - Switchboard
• Current technical writer: @emily.sahlani
• Incoming technical writer: @lyspin
• Reassignment milestone: by 18.0 release (May 15, 2025)

Tasks for current technical writer

• Invite the incoming TW to the stage and group Slack channels.
  • Channel list:
    • infrastructure_platforms
    • f_gitlab_dedicated
    • g_dedicated-team
    • g_dedicated-team-social
    • g_dedicated-switchboard-team
    • support_gitlab-dedicated (optional)
    • sme-dedicated (optional)
• Post in Slack about the changeover. Communicate the timeline and how MRs will be handled.
• Reach out to the Product Manager, Engineering Manager, and Design Manager to communicate the change.
  • PM: @lbortins
  • EM: @ashiel
  • PDM: @rayana

Provide group insights

To make the transition easier for the incoming technical writer, answer these questions in a comment thread. Consider making the comment an internal note. Give as much detail as you feel is needed. The incoming technical writer should feel free to ask questions about any of these details:

• How does the Product Manager plan work for future milestones? Provide links to relevant boards.
• How does the group prefer to communicate in issues and MRs regarding reviews?
• What is the maturity of the feature set and documentation for the feature set?
• How well are features of the group known to people outside the group?
• How much UI text work does the group generate?
• Can the feature set for the group be explored solely on GitLab.com, or does it also require GDK or access to third-party tools?
• Does the group attract a lot of Support Team Contributions and Community contribution?

Tasks for EMs and PMs

• Add the incoming TW to team meetings and any group aliases.
  • Meeting list: TBD
  • Group aliases: TBD
• Async retrospectives (if applicable):
  • Update teams.yml.
  • If the retrospective happens in a private project, add the TW to it.
• Remove the outgoing TW from team meetings and any group aliases.
• Determine the resources needed by the incoming TW to learn the stage / group features, similar to an engineer's onboarding.

Tasks for incoming technical writer

• Set up coffee chats with the group's:
  • Product manager
  • Engineering manager
  • Frontend and backend team members (not necessary to meet all)
  • UX designer
• Read the product documentation associated with your group (as identified by the group attribute in documentation pages' metadata).
• In the www-gitlab-com repository, update:
  • data/stages.yml, with your new assignment. If you're onboarding as a new Technical Writer, you can wait until you've completed a full release cycle as a trainee before doing this step and the next steps.
• In the gitlab repository, update as needed (in the following order, but can be done in the same MR):
  1. The metadata in all related markdown files (if the group name changed).
  2. Group assignments in lib/tasks/gitlab/tw/codeowners.rake.
  3. .gitlab/CODEOWNERS by running the tw:codeowners Rake task to ensure no pages are missed.
• If the group was previously assigned to the #docs channel, add it to the TW milestone plan template.

Tasks for technical writing manager

• Update google sheets used for team rebalancing planning.
• Check Workday for the Job Title Specialty (Multi-Select). If the specialty does not exist, create an issue in the People Group general project, and use the Workday: Job Title Specialty Request template.
• Update Workday with the new group assignments. Log a HelpLab Job Title Specialty Change request for the People group to update Workday with the new group assignments. Workday updates the group assignments in data/team_members/person.