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Working together on about.gitlab.com and customers.gitlab.com

Problem

In the last week or so, a few people in product and engineering have been making sweeping changes to the website. While it's nice to get things done quickly, the pace might've been too high for proper collaboration.

At the same time, I hear noises that it's hard to get anything live on the website for anyone outside of engineering and that it feels like you'd have to pray for a change to come online.

It sounds like we can kill two birds with one stone here. I think what we're missing is:

  • a definition of ownership
  • a clear process that will allow everyone to contribute to the website and make use of engineering power to get your changes live.

Proposal

  • @regisF is already the edge PM, under which falls the website. He will manage bringing large changes that require engineering (such as completely new pages, large changes to funnels, etc) to the website and customers.gitlab.com
  • Anyone that is interested in making a certain change they can't do themselves can call upon him to get the people together to make that change, through the process below
  • at the same time, Product as a whole will coordinate their wishes and changes with the marketing and sales team better. This by following the process as specified below.
  • we will use milestones to indicate when we'll work on what, @regisF manages these
  • as before, anyone that can make their own changes / changes that are small should always be able to push directly to the site. Large changes are changes that require more than a few minutes or involve changing funnels or major marketing elements.

The process is the same as always:

  • create an issue before you start to work
  • mention all the relevant parties in the issue
  • approach anyone whose opinion is important or who has a stake in this change and hasn't replied to the issue yet

Ownership

  • @regisF manages milestones and coordinates engineering efforts to the website
  • @luke leads any design efforts needed (as to not speak upon the UX team)
  • the marketing team owns the content of the website ??? Part of it ??? Product does ??? Everyone ???
  • the product team owns the comparison tables

Example

Right now, not every feature on /features has its own page. It makes sense to make this.

If I am interested in doing this, I will:

  1. Create an issue describing what I want
  2. I mention @amara to help me with the content, structure, opinion and other mentions
  3. I mention @regisF to schedule and execute the change
  4. The page appears some time later with the efforts of @luke and any engineers necessary

@timanglade @amara @mitchellwright @stanhu @awhildy @chetbackman