Product Milestones

When planning, Product Managers plan to GitLab milestones. Here is the process for creating and maintaining them.

Product Milestone Creation

One quarter ahead, the Engineering team, in partnership with the Product team, will create all of the necessary milestones for the next quarter. Our standard practice is to have the Major release every May, resulting in:

XX.0 - May
XX.1 - June
XX.2 - July
XX.3 - August
XX.4 - September
XX.5 - October
XX.6 - November
XX.7 - December
XX.8 - January
XX.9 - February
XX.10 - March
XX.11 - April

Milestone start and end dates are defined as follows:

The next milestone m+1 starts the Saturday prior to the current milestone m’s release date and runs through the Friday prior to the milestone m+1’s release date.

To update the milestones in GitLab, Product Operations follows these steps:

Step 1: .org

1. Ensure that the relevant milestones are created. Go to GitLab Milestones for .org
2. Click on New milestone in the top right
3. Title the milestone with the dot release that makes sense.
   • Note: We iterate through the .0 and further for each release with the .0 release every May.
4. Set the start date to be the Saturday prior to the previous releases release date
5. Set the end date to be the Friday prior to the third Thursday of the release month
6. Closing milestones happens in the Engineering workflow

Step 2: .com

1. Ensure that .com mirrors the .org milestones for consistency in Product, Marketing etc.
2. Ensure that the relevant milestones are created. Go to GitLab Milestones for .com
3. Click on New milestone in the top right
4. Title the milestone with the dot release that matches .org.
   • Note: We iterate through the .0 and further for each release with the .0 release every May.
5. Set the start date to be the Saturday prior to the previous releases release date
6. Set the end date to be the Friday prior to the third Thursday of the release month
7. Closing milestones happens in the Engineering workflow

Understanding Releases

The release definitions are maintained by the Engineering Team and we run the end of each Milestone on the release date.

Product Milestones Usage

• These milestones are used create boards and Issues for each release
• The Product Development Google Calendar (WIP) - also uses these milestone names and dates.

Relevant links

• Engineering release definitions