Aligning Work Items To Themes

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5. Aligning Work Items To Themes

Pilot Context

This process is currently in a limited pilot in conjunction with the Customer Issues Prioritization Framework Pilot and is subject to breaking changes.

Process Goals

Provide a repeatable, scalable process to map issues and epics to Top ARR drivers and top-down / bottoms-up product direction and investment themes to enable programatic, automated reporting and analysis.

Benefits To PMs

By labeling your issues and epics with themes, all customer requests and their respective value will be aggregated and available via the Customer Issues Prioritization Framework. What this practically means for you:

• No need to scoure SalesForce to determine the Net ARR impact of a theme.
• Automatically see a list of all customers linked to a theme, their relative priority, and break down of value by growth and retention.
• In the future, awesome historical data on the relative customer interest and demand for a given theme.

Process TL;DR

1. Apply Existing Theme Labels: Product Managers label their respective issues with one of the available theme:: scoped labels.
2. Create New Theme Labels - Product Managers can create their own theme labels if one of the existing theme labels does not appropriately speak to the context of the workstream.
3. Investment Labels (TBD) - Product Leadership maintains a list of of investment:: labels which map to our Product Investment Themes.
4. Map Themes To Product Investments (TBD) - If applicable, ensure all theme labels map to investment labels.
5. Analysis & Reporting - View customer requested issues aggregated by theme or investment on the relevant dashboards

Process

Apply Existing Theme Labels

For the relevant issues and epics on your roadmap/direction, label them with an existing theme:: label so they can be automatically mapped (eventually – TBD) to our primary product investment themes.

Create New Theme Labels

If you want to create a bottoms-up theme, head to gitlab-org to create a new theme:: label. Guidelines for creating the label:

• Label must start with theme::, be lower-case, and use the same color as the other theme labels.
• Provide a helpful, contextual description with links to content like a direction page for further reading.
• The description must include the PM DRI's GitLab handle.

Investment Labels (TBD)

This exact process is TBD based on the best implementation and automation path.

Map Themes To Product Investments (TBD)

This exact process is TBD based on the best implementation and automation path.

Analysis & Reporting

Heads Up: Integrating theme aggregation into the Customer Request Issues (Product) dashboard has not been completed yet.