Ship Roadmap MVP

[corywatilo]

Initial work for #4442 is merged, now we just have some remaining tasks before we "publicly" launch it.

To-dos

• Mailchimp integration - add email to MailChimp and set a tag when a user is interested in a specific feature
• Figure out the criteria for showing some recently completed items
• Place group of items without a set team at the bottom
• Add team dropdown to add/edit screen (in Squeak! admin)
• Make sure we're in sync with business processes around this
• Add hero image from this mock (included below)

Stretch

Implement the roadmap in other views throughout the site:

• Build Full changelog #4458
• Add In progress items to Small Team pages
• Add In progress items to job postings linked to the relevant Small Team
• Leverage "Milestone" option to aggregate only major company updates to /about page in a timeline-style design
• Add Under consideration block to homepage (concept mock)

[corywatilo]

[joethreepwood]

Do you have any thoughts on how this will interface with the current Array process? We have a monthly release coming up in the next two weeks (which means we'll start writing the blog post next week). If the roadmap has shipped by then, I'd like to avoid double-announcing things or dividing traffic (e.g. telling people to check the roadmap and array).

My preference would be to centralize everything in to the roadmap and retire Array -- especially if we're including a fuller changelog for smaller changes. Just may be worth thinking about redirecting /blog/categories/product-updates and thinking about how users can discover this content from the homepage.

[joethreepwood]

Two additional thoughts now that I've had a chance to look at the existing content:

• Can we add / do we have a way to highlight particular items which have recently been delivered and which are particularly notable? The launch of EU Cloud, for example, is something we may want to elevate above the likes of 'Salesforce Connector released'.
• Does the page cut off after a certain length? Looking at /roadmap right now, it seems like the page is very long already, which may be annoying when we imagine we're going to be adding an additional 5-6 new features each month (one per small team).

[joethreepwood]

Additional feedback after chatting w/ @jamesefhawkins is that I noticed we pull from Recently Shipped to populate the roadmap on the frontpage. However the layout of Recently Shipped on /roadmap doesn't list dates, groups items by team and is titled to suggest that it only includes recent items.

This leads me to believe we should remove most items from the current Recently Shipped column, only include items from recent arrays and generally curate what appears in this column carefully - but in doing so we'd depopulate the roadmap visual on the front page?

Maybe the simplest solution is an update of the Milestone field, so that we can tag items as Milestone only, such that they appear on the homepage roadmap but not on /roadmap.

[corywatilo]

do we have a way to highlight particular items which have recently been delivered and which are particularly notable?

Yes, this is what we'll use the Milestone option for.

For now, I would only focus on getting the data into Squeak!, as we haven't finished the presentation layer. (That's what we're working on over the next week.) I'd suggest planning to do a normal Array post and not planning on pointing to this for the time being (for any recently completed work).

[joethreepwood]

Sounds good (and I literally just Slacked you to the same effect 🙌 ).

FYI on the subscription process, @jamesefhawkins were just about the previously suggested process, where he outlines a process of using Private channels. However, this creates a degree of manual (and potentially slow, difficult) work for adding these users to the private channels -- especially if they aren't on Slack yet, etc.

The MVP approach we should move forward with for now is (changes in bold):

• We set up a OPEN slack channel with each team that has something listed above, in our community slack.
• User signs up to a beta program
• We take them to a form that we need to build (so we can understand them as an ICP or not)
• In the email notification they get confirming their subscription we ask them to join the relevant Slack channel
• When they're in Slack say "hey let's get you access" and introduce ourselves to start a chat
• Marketing provide regular content on anything that happens to keep them excited and engaged

I've set up the relevant open channels with the right participants in each, in the community Slack: team-pipeline, team-analytics, team-infrastructure, team-experimentation and team-recordings.

[joethreepwood]

Right, I believe I've added most of the In Consideration and In Progress content we'd want to include here, and have asked team leads to take a glance and confirm/approve, which they all have.

I've also added relevant links to all 'Recently completed' items, but as discussed elsewhere we need to support non-GH links and decouple this from the timeline on the front page in order to make this more usable.

---

Feedback:
I've made issues which include CTAs for votes and give concise descriptions, but a challenge I see is that the roadmap doesn't easily fit with the way teams currently document or manage their work.

Currently, work exists as either RFCs in private repos which can't be surfaced here, or as Sprint plans which aren't very suitable because they span multiple teams and date very quickly. The current idea of creating new issues and descriptions for each idea/project adds a lot of process/maintenance around things that the teams already document elsewhere. It creates extra admin/planning work for teams (or for me, who will ultimately be reliant on teams for the information anyway).

I think it's either going to slow us down by making us duplicate work, or it would quickly go out of date. Instead, I think we should look at a solution which better fits the way we currently work, perhaps by surfacing (polished) sprint plans and asking users to give feedback there. This could happen either via the blog, or through a different roadmap design.

I'm also not sure we'll get the intended benefit (more feedback) from this approach, because we're dividing users across multiple channels and don't have clear views of processes for this.

For example, we ask people to 'Get early access' (which may not be possible and has complexities for organizations), so we can send them updates by email (which they already get via Array) and provide feedback through GitHub and Slack (which they can already do).

We should tweak some of the CTAs (Early access -> Subscribe for updates) and I think consider how and where the best place to encourage feedback is, then find a way to better drive that behaviour without adding more issue-creating work.

[jamesefhawkins]

Discussed with Joe:

• not every new thing we work on will have a beta (like SOC2)
• yet we want to show that we're working on more than just the beta-able things

Solution:

• make a toggle in Squeak! for 'beta available'
• display beta CTA in this case
• rank beta CTA stuff at the top

[jamesefhawkins]

As for the work in progress stuff, maybe we should figure out if we can make the existing work public. We should definitely avoid duplicating it in two places?

[joethreepwood]

@smallbrownbike and I just caught up. If someone clicks to join a beta, what really happens for now is that they are added to a Mailchimp audience. We still want users to subscribe for things for which there is not a beta, so that we can email them when features they are interested in (such as SOC 2) launch. So, the neatest solution is to have the CTA change between two states -- 'Follow for updates' and 'Get early access'.

In the short term, I can manually follow-up with users who request early access and give them next steps if a beta is available.

I'm also setting up an email to let users know they have joined the list and what the next steps are, joining Slack, etc.

We don't currently capture ICP information via a form for the MVP - users instead login via Squeak!.

[joethreepwood]

Sends to all users who subscribe, immediately.

[smallbrownbike]

make a toggle in Squeak! for 'beta available'
display beta CTA in this case
rank beta CTA stuff at the top

This is now ready to use via #4501

[corywatilo]

More todos

• Document how roadmap subscription stuff works @smallbrownbike
  • How people get added to mailchimp and how they’re tagged
  • If we're sending them a confirmation email
  • How we're pushing people to Slack
  • Difference between Subscribe for updates and Get early access

Bugs

• Currently getting a 502 (from Mailchimp) when clicking any subscription button

  

[corywatilo]

@smallbrownbike @joethreepwood Did we ever get documentation written up around how to maintain roadmap, especially now that we're using Customer.io for it?

[joethreepwood]

I've not worked on any documentation for Squeak/Roadmap, no -- will have the Mailchimp flow mirrored into Customer.io today though, as @smallbrownbike has now set up the trigger for the campaign 👌