CI/CD UX Team
Hello!
Welcome to the GitLab CI/CD UX team handbook page. We’re comprised of three stage groups that support designing and building the GitLab DevOps product: Verify, Package, Deploy, and SaaS Platforms stages.
Who We Are
| GitLab.com | @gitlab-com/gitlab-ux/cicd-ux
|
| Slack channel | #ux_ci-cd
(internal only)|
| Youtube playlists | CI/CD UX - Team Meetings |
| | CI/CD UX Team - Design Reviews |
| Ops Section page | Ops handbook |
Vision
Our mission is to design and create simple, clean ways to make GitLab the tool of choice for deploying software where, when, and how users want.
Our design team works to ensure the best experience for users of all knowledge levels, allowing them to successfully apply the continuous methods (Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment) to their software with no third-party application or integration needed.
Structure
Verify
TBA
Package
TBA
Deploy
TBA
Switchboard
TBA
Strategy
Our product design team is working to uncover customers’ core needs and streamlining their workflows by being the conversation drivers with product managers, developers and other counterparts across stage groups. We contribute to the UX Department Direction, Ops Product Section Direction and SaaS Platforms Direction in the following ways:
TBA
Understanding Our Users
Different user types are considered in our experience design effort. Even when a user has the same title, their responsibilities may vary by organization size, department, organization structure, and role. Some of the people we are serving are:
Strategic counterparts
TBA
Measuring Results
OKRs
TBA
Performance Indicators
Deferred UX in CI/CD
How we work
Team Onboarding
- Coming soon
Career Development
Apart from GitLab’s 360 Feedback and annual Talent Assessment, our team uses a number of approaches to identify opportunities to develop their skills and knowledge. At least once a year, each Product Designer should have a career development conversation with their manager to set the tone and direction of their yearly growth and development plans. An Individual Growth Plan (IGP) is created to outline professional goals and steps to accomplish them. Finally, a conversation is followed up with monthly/quarterly checkpoints and frequents 1:1s where team members and manager talk about the IGP plan, accomplishments, and iterations of the goals.
Use the following issue templates to plan and prepare for career conversations with your manager:
- Part 1: Individual Growth Plan template
- Part 2: Career Development Plan template
Use the following agenda template for monthly/quarterly checkpoints with your manager:
- Career progress conversation template
Workflows
We follow the workflows outlined in the UX section of the handbook. In addition, we do the following:
- Track team-specif OKRs to execute our UX Department strategy.
- Use our own UX Definition of Done (DoD).
- Participate in the monthly milestone kick off. Together with Product Managers, we record a video with a focus on the user experience, front-end (user interface design) and research innitiatives.
- Perform synchronous and asyncrhonous design reviews.
Recurring Meetings
Our team meets every two weeks to discuss our work, processes, talk about user research activities, share knowledge, and raise questions to each other. We are also using session for team retrospectives, as well as sharing useful resources around design and DevOps domains. You can watch the CI/CD UX Team Meeting videos on Unfiltered.
UX Definition of Done (UX DoD)
The UX DoD lists the activities a Product Designer is responsible for in the Product Development Flow. This list can be applied to an epic/issue, and serves as a tool for describing and tracking the expected UX deliverables, objectives, and the approval process.
To keep the process efficient, depending on the scope of a problem, a Product Designer might not need to check off all of the items in the UX DoD while working through the Product Development Flow.
You can add the following checklist to an issue description to help illustrate the “completeness” of a design proposal:
|
|
This week I learned
We use the geekbot Slack plugin to automate our async weekly retrospective called This Week I Learned. Participation is optional but encouraged. Every Friday at 9am on each team memeber’s local time zone, geekbot asks “What did you learn this week?”, “What’s something you’re looking forward to in the next week?”, “Is there something puzzling you? If so, who can support you?”. Answers are posted in the #ux_ci-cd Slack channel.
9fb8f52d
)