Product and Solution Marketing On-Boarding and Other How-to's

Objective: Manually creating a Kubernetes cluster to use with Auto DevOps in GitLab

You will need Kubernetes cluster up and running in order to use GitLab Auto DevOps feature. This is a step by step guide to help you to manually create a Kubernetes cluster in Google Cloud Platform.

More details Auto DevOps

Preparation

You need a Google Cloud Platform account, GitLab employees will have this. Ensure you are logged in with your GitLab account.

Objective

A quick overview of how to plan and manage regular work using GitLab. The focus of this page is to help you learn how to work with Groups, Projects, Issues and Boards to plan and manage the your work and your team’s work.

Note: If you are only looking for instructions on how to submit an Issue, feel free to skip forward to Issues in Action.

The Big Picture

Organizing

GitLab provides Groups, Sub-Groups and Projects to structure your organization’s work and grant access to several members at once. For example,

Objective

Marketing creates and maintains quite a few presentations for various stakeholders - like analysts, sales, customers. Some of the commonly maintained presentations are available in the sales resources handbook page. There is common content across the slides. The focus of this page is to explain how we manage common slides across various presentations that strategic marketing creates for various stakeholders.

Single directory with commonly used slides

All common slides will be maintained as individual slides in this strategic marketing master slides folder. The most recent and up to date version of the common slides will be maintained in this folder.

Objective

Often you need to manage a set of consistently repeating events, where multiple issues are used to track the combined activity of a team. This page describes how to utilize GitLab Issue Import and a few spreadsheet tricks to make it possible to create a repeatable set of issues for future projects.

The Issue Import CSV button is at the top of the GitLab project issue list. This feature can be very useful for repeating projects with similar groups of issues / work.

Objective

When you use issues and labels to manage day to day work and define a specific process, often there are situations and times where it’s hard to keep labels in the right status. For example:

• Label Hygene: Consider a situation where there is a process defined by an overall label (ABC) and the specific steps in the process are defined by the scoped labels (ABC::1, ABC::2, and ABC::3)

Communications within Product and Solution Marketing

As a distributed organization, GitLab and our Product and Solution Marketing department and teams use asynchronous, transparent, frequent, and multimodal communication to keep ourselves informed.

Our most important communication channels are issues, boards, and GitLab itself, followed by this handbook, Slack, Zoom, and other tools. See the general GitLab Communication page and Tools and Tips for more information.

Below are the parts of GitLab and Slack that are used most in Product and Solution Marketing.

What is a Group Conversation (GC)?

GitLab departments update the rest of the company on what they are achieving and working on through Group Conversations. Group Conversations are an important way to make sure the rest of the organization is aware of what each team is up to, has an opportunity to ask questions, and have a collection of links and information for reference.

Old GC decks

The Product and Solution Marketing department (formerly known as Product Marketing) previous decks are in our Google drive (GitLab employees only). It’s useful when putting together the next GC deck to look at the last one to make sure that items on the calendar edge don’t get missed or included a second time.

Project management overview

In Product and Solution Marketing, we have several processes to manage the work the team does

1. Commitment management - how do we know what we’re committed to
2. Epics (larger projects) - how do we plan big projects
3. Monitoring and reporting progress - how do we track progress
4. Using Labels and keeping them clean - how do we keep our labels
5. Priority - how do we indicate what’s most important
6. Managing Workflow - how do we manage our workflow

Commitment management

We are often asked / requested to work on multiple efforts, across the company. For example,