Solution Validation: Group-Level Production Environments
What did we learn?
Results |
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We have decided not to move forward with this concept in favour of the outcomes of the Environment Management Design Sprint. We learned a lot of incredibly useful insights during these interviews. There were aspects of the proposal that customers loved (addition of more detailed environment states, metrics, higher level visibility), but ultimately uncovered what I think we knew was wrong with the feature from the beginning. The current state of the environments feature is not working as users expect - causing low adoption. They often use third party tools for everything from monitoring their environments, to sending notifications, or just forgo this with GitLab all together. Basically, the proposal we were validating was a nice addition to an already sub-par experience. We quickly realized it would be more productive enhance the current experience verse adding to it. Along with this customers were all using Groups in different ways, which didn't scale to how they would want to monitor environments at that level. With all this being said, we are decided to move forward with the Design Sprint Concept of re-thinking environment management at GitLab. Interested in following along with what's next? Everything will be linked in the following Epic. |
Link to Dovetail project |
What's this issue all about? (Background and context)
Users are interested in visualizing production environments across projects, for example, they have several microservices that are built in different projects are compiled in a pipeline and deployed to a single URL. There is no way to see that all these micro-service project are populating a single end-user application.
The user should be able to view see related Production project environments at the group in a new section in the group-level left navigation.
We have crafted up a solution to this problem, and need to validate that users are able to achieve the goals set out by the initial issue.
JTBD: As a release manager / platform engineer, I want to see the status of my multi-project application’s production environment and recent changes in one place so I can easily understand everything that has been deployed to my end users.
What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?
- Users will be able to more quickly and easily see what is happening to their production environments than our current offered experiences (Environments Dashboard or manually checking all projects).
What are the overarching goals for the research?
- The new design will result in less manual setup, better understanding of environment health and status, and better usability than our previous environments dashboard.
- After conducting interviews, we will better understand what data users need to see to feel confident they know the status of all their production environments within a group.
What research questions are you trying to answer?
- Are users able to easily understand the health and status of their production environments?
- Does the information on the page make sense from a visual hierarchy perspective?
- Are users able to find the location of this new page in the left navigation.
- Is there any information missing that users would like to see on this page?
What persona, persona segment, or customer type experiences the problem most acutely?
- Rachel (Release Manager)
- Delaney (Development Team Lead)
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Priyanka (Platform Engineer)
What business decisions will be made based on this information?
- The outcomes of this research will let us confidently move forward with the proposal shown in Add dynamically populated organization-level en... (gitlab#241506 - closed), knowing we are providing users with the best information they need to manage environments at that group level.
What, if any, relevant prior research already exists?
- Multi Project Action & Testing Validation (gitlab#197114 - closed)
- How can we make managing planning and executing releases across repos easy?
- CMS Scorecard - Release: FY23-Q4 - Environment Management Viable
Who will be leading the research?
What timescales do you have in mind for the research?
- Completed in 15.11 - 16.0