Transition AI-powered / Custom Models to Fiona Neill

Tasks for current technical writer

  • Invite the incoming TW to the stage and group Slack channels.
    • Channel list: #g_custom_models
  • 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.

Provide group insights

👁️ Make the comment an internal note.

To make the transition easier for the incoming technical writer, answer these questions in a comment thread. 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?
    • Tags the TW for review and feedback in issues and MRs.
    • The team will ask for your review and feedback on both documentation and UI text.
  • What is the maturity of the feature set and documentation for the feature set?
    • GitLab Duo Self-Hosted went GA in 17.10. It is rapidly expanding and maturing, in line with the overall pace of change in the AI-powered space.
  • How well are features of the group known to people outside the group?
    • I believe it is increasingly well-known in both GitLab internally and to our customer base.
  • How much UI text work does the group generate?
    • Around 1-2 MRs per month on average for the last 3-5 milestones. The frontend engineer is very conscientious about asking for TW review on UI text.
  • 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?
    • I believe you require GDK access.
  • Does the group attract a lot of Support Team Contributions and Community contribution?
    • Not as far as I'm aware.

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:
  • 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

Edited by Fiona Neill