Collaboration on shared feature and experience areas

Collaboration process and documentation of shared feature areas for product groups

Cross-stage feature collaboration

Each stage is responsible for building functionality that furthers their vision and direction. Even if some components of that functionality happen to cross into spaces typically owned by other stages, they should still build it (if it’s important to them).

If the feature isn’t necessary or urgently needed to move forward (for example, it won’t block another feature’s development), then you can always consider putting it on the backlog of the stage that owns that feature.

Here are some guidelines for thinking about “Which stage should do this work?”:

  1. If a stage wants to develop new functionality that is core to their value, even if it happens to live inside a feature owned by another stage, they should still build it.
  2. Alternately, if the functionality lives inside another stage’s feature, but is also very-much a “nice-to-have”, they should consider putting it in an issue and labeling it appropriately. This way, the stage that owns that feature can prioritize it at a later date when it makes sense for them to do so.
  3. External requests for integration with 3rd-party systems should be routed to the group closest to the integrations value proposition or affected area. If none can be found, it can be routed to Manage:Import and Integrate group.

This model allows teams to be flexible and calibrate their priorities accordingly, and no team should ever be “blocked.” Exceptions may be items where a change requires anything that a software engineer would not be allowed to do, such as a production change, in which case the infrastructure team would be the blocker.

While any team can contribute features to any stage, it is recommended to loop in the most relevant PM from that Group to provide strategic support to help the contributing team align to the Group’s broader plan and vision.

Below is a guide to help other product groups understand how to work on these areas and quickly locate the best parties who may assist on the subject matter.

This section is modeled after the engineering handbook version of ownership of shared services and components.

Existing Cross-Stage Capabilities

Planned Cross-Stage Improvements

Collaboration on merge requests experience
Collaboration process and documentation for contributing to the merge requests experience
Collaboration on work items framework
Collaboration process and documentation for using and contributing to the work items framework
Last modified August 9, 2024: Integration requests should start with closest groups (ba905e35)
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