fleet/handbook/product

Product

⚗️ Backlog: https://app.zenhub.com/workspaces/-product-backlog-coming-soon-6192dd66ea2562000faea25c/board

Job to be done

Every product should have a single job that it strives to do. We use the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework. Fleet's overarching job to be done is the following:

"I need a way to see what laptops and servers I have and what I need to do to keep them secure and compliant."

Product design process

The product team is responsible for product design tasks. These include drafting changes to the Fleet product, reviewing and collecting feedback from engineering, sales, customer success, and marketing counterparts, and delivering these changes to the engineering team.

Look here for more information about Using Figma.

Drafting

• Take the top issue that is assigned to you in the "Prioritized" column of the Backlog board.

• Create a page in the Fleet EE (scratchpad, dev-ready) Figma file and combine your issue's number and title to name the Figma page.

• Draft changes to the Fleet product that solve the problem specified in the issue. Constantly place yourself in the shoes of a user while drafting changes. Place these drafts in the appropriate Figma page in Fleet EE (scratchpad, dev-ready).

• While drafting, reach out to sales, customer success, and marketing for a business perspective.

• While drafting, engage engineering to gain insight into technical costs and feasibility.

Review

• Schedule a design review to review the draft.
• During the product huddle meeting, record and address any feedback on the draft.

Deliver

Once the draft has been approved:

• move it to the "Designed" column in the Backlog board
• make sure that the issue is updated with the latest information on the work to be done, such as link to the correct page in the Fleet EE (scratchpad) Figma and most recent requirements.

As drafting occurs, inevitably, the requirements will change. The main description of the issue should be the single source of truth for the problem to be solved and the required outcome. The product manager is responsible for keeping the main description of the issue up-to-date. Comments and other items can and should be kept in the issue for historical record-keeping.

Priority drafting

Priority drafting is the revision of drafted changes currently being developed by the engineering team. Priority drafting aims to quickly adapt to unknown edge cases and changing specifications while ensuring that Fleet meets our brand and quality guidelines.

Priority drafting occurs in the following scenarios:

• A drafted UI change is missing crucial information that prevents the engineering team from continuing the development task.

• Functionality included in a drafted UI change must be cut down in order to ship the improvement in the currently scheduled release.

What happens during priority drafting?

1. Everyone on the product and engineering teams know that a drafted change was brought back to drafting and prioritized.

2. Drafts are updated to cover edge cases or reduce functionality.

3. UI changes are reviewed, and the UI changes are brought back to the engineering team to continue the development task.

Planning

• The intake process for a given group (how new issues are received from a given requestor and estimated within the group's timeframe) is up to each group's PM. For example, the Interface group's intake process consists of attending the 🗣️ Product Feature Requests meeting and making a case, at which time a decision about whether to draft an estimate will be made on the spot.

• New unestimated issues are created in the Planning board, which is shared by each group.

• The estimation process to use is up to the EM of each group (with buy-in from the PM), with the goal of delivering estimated issues within the group's timeframe, which is set for each group by the Head of Product. No matter the group, only work that is slated to be released into the hands of users within ≤six weeks will be estimated. Estimation is run by each group's EM and occurs on the Planning board. Some groups may choose to use "timeboxes" rather than estimates.

• Prioritization will now occur at the point of intake by the PM of the group. Besides the 20% "engineering initiatives," only issues prioritized by the group PM or worked on or estimated. On the first day of each release, all estimated issues are moved into the relevant section of the new "Release" board, which has a kanban view per group.

• Work that does not "fit" into the scheduled release (due to lack of capacity or otherwise) remains in the "Estimated" column of the product board and is removed from that board if it is not prioritized in the following release.

Process

1. Intake: Each group has a "time til estimated" timeframe, which measures the time from when an idea is first received until it is written up as an estimated issue and the requestor is notified exactly which aspects are scheduled for release. How intake works, and the estimation timeframe, vary per group, but every group has an estimation timeframe.

2. Estimation: The estimation process varies per group. In the Interface group, it consists of drafting, API design, and either planning poker or a quick timebox decided by the group EM. When the Interface group relies on the Platform group for part of an issue, only the Interface group's work is estimated. It is up to the Interface PM to obtain estimated Platform issues for any needed work and thus make sure it is scheduled in the appropriate release. It is up to the Platform PM to get those specced (in consultation with Engineering), then up to the Engineering to estimate and communicate promptly if issues arise. We avoid having more estimated issues than capacity in the next release. If the team is fully allocated, no more issues will be estimated, or the PM will decide whether to swap anything out. Once estimated, an issue is scheduled for release.

3. Development: Development starts on the first day of the new release. Only estimated issues are scheduled for release.

4. Quality assurance (QA): Everyone in each group is responsible for quality: engineers, PM, and the EM. The QA process varies per group and is set by the group's PM. For example, in the Interface group, every issue is QA'd (i.e. a per-change basis), as well as a holistic "smoke test" during the last few days of each release.

5. Release: Release dates are time-based and happen even if all features are not complete (± a day or two sometimes, if there's an emergency. Either way, the next release cycle starts on time). If anything is not finished, or can only be finished with changes, the PM finds out immediately and notifies the requestor right away.

Timeframes

These are effectively internal SLAs. We moved away from the term "SLA" to avoid potential confusion with future, contractual Service Level Agreements Fleet might sign with its customers.

Prioritization

≤Five business days from when the initial request is weighed by PM, requestor has heard back from the group PM whether the request will be prioritized.

Release

≤Six weeks from when the initial request is weighed by PM, this is released into the hands of the Fleet community, generally available (no feature flags or limitations except as originally specced or as adjusted if necessary).

Work that is prioritized by the group PM should be released in the six week timeframe (two releases). Work that is too large for this timeframe should be split up.

Estimation

≤Five business days from the initial request, an issue is created with a summary of the purpose, the goal, and the plan to achieve it. The level of detail in that plan is up to the PM of the product group. The issue also has an estimation, expressed in story points, which is either determined through planning poker or a "timebox."

For the Interface group, "estimated" means UI wireframes and API design are completed, and the work to implement them has been estimated.

Adjustment

≤One business day from discovering some blocker or change necessary to already prioritized and estimated work. The group PM decides how the usage/UI will be changed and notifies the original requestor of changes to the spec.

UI design

Design conventions

We have certain design conventions that we include in Fleet. We will document more of these over time.

Table empty states

Use ---, with color $ui-fleet-black-50 as the default UI for empty columns.

Form behavior

Pressing the return or enter key with an open form will cause the form to be submitted.

Internal links

For text links that navigates the user to a different page within the Fleet UI, use the $core-blue color and xs-bold styling. You'll also want to make sure to use the underline style for when the user hovers over these links.

External links

For a link that navigates the user to an external site (e.g., fleetdm.com/docs), use the $core-blue color and xs-bold styling for the link's text. Also, place the link-out icon to the right of the link's text.

Tooltips

All tooltips change the cursor to a question mark on hover. All tooltips have a solid background color.

There are two types of tooltips. The two types of tooltips have some unique styles:

1. Tooltips for text (column headers, input titles, inline text) appear when hovering over any text with a dashed underline. These tooltips use left-aligned text.

2. Tooltips for buttons, bubbles, table row elements, and other non-text elements appear when hovering over the element. These tooltips use center-aligned text. These tooltips include a centered arrow.

Release

This section outlines the communication between the product, marketing, and customer success teams prior to a release of Fleet.

Goal

Keep non-engineering and product departments up to date with improvements and changes to the Fleet product so that all stakeholders can communicate with customers and users.

Product marketing tiers

After the kickoff of a product sprint, the marketing and product teams should decide which features are most important to highlight. When a feature gets scheduled for release, the Tier determines the marketing effort for the feature. Once the features have been discussed the next step is to bucket them into tiers for marketing prioritization. The current tiers are 1-3.

• Tier 1: A separate product feature announcement. The most important release types, these require a specific and custom marketing package. Usually including an individual blog post, a demo video and potentially a press release or official product marketing launch. Due to limited availability there is only room for one Tier 1 product announcement per release sprint.
• Tier 2: A highlighted feature in the release notes. This product feature will be highlighted at the top of the Sprint Release blog post. Depending on the feature specifics this will include: a 1-2 paragraph write-up of the feature, a demo video (if applicable) and a link to the docs. Ideally there would be no more than 3 Tier 2 features in a release post, otherwise the top features will be crowded.
• Tier 3: A feature worth mentioning in the changelog. In most cases a product feature will fit into this Tier. This includes 1-2 sentences in the Changelog and release blog post.

Blog post

The product team is responsible for providing the marketing team with the necessary information for writing the release blog post. Every three weeks after the sprint is kicked off, the product team meets with the relevant marketing team members to go over the features for that sprint and recommend items to highlight.

The release blog post issue includes a list of the primary Tier 2/3 features included in the upcoming release. This list of features should point the reader to the GitHub issue that explains each feature in more detail.

Find an example release blog post issue here.

Customer announcement

The product team is responsible for providing the customer success team with the necessary information for writing a release customer announcement. This is accomplished by filing a release customer announcement issue and adding the issue to the customer success board on GitHub.

The release blog post issue is filed in the private fleetdm/confidential repository because the comment section may contain private information about Fleet's customers.

Find an example release customer announcement blog post issue here.

Beta features

At Fleet, features are advertised as "beta" if there are concerns that the feature may not work as intended in certain Fleet deployments. For example, these concerns could be related to the feature's performance in Fleet deployments with hundreds of thousands of hosts.

The following highlights should be considered when deciding if we promote a feature as "beta:"

• The feature will not be advertised as "beta" permanently. This means that the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) who decides a feature is advertised as "beta" is also responsible for creating an issue that explains why the feature is advertised as "beta" and tracking the feature's progress towards advertising the feature as "stable."
• The feature will be advertised as "beta" in the documentation on fleetdm.com/docs, release notes, release blog posts, and Twitter.

Feature flags

At Fleet, features are placed behind feature flags if the changes could affect Fleet's availability of existing functionalities.

The following highlights should be considered when deciding if we should leverage feature flags:

• The feature flag must be disabled by default.
• The feature flag will not be permanent. This means that the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) who decides a feature flag should be introduced is also responsible for creating an issue to track the feature's progress towards removing the feature flag and including the feature in a stable release.
• The feature flag will not be advertised. For example, advertising in the documentation on fleetdm.com/docs, release notes, release blog posts, and Twitter.

Fleet's feature flag guidelines is borrowed from GitLab's "When to use feature flags" section of their handbook. Check out GitLab's "Feature flags only when needed" video for an explanation of the costs of introducing feature flags.

Significant changes

For product changes that cause major impact for users, or even just create impression of major impact, the company plans migration thoughtfully. That means the product department and E-group:

1. Written: Write a migration guide, even if that's just a Google Doc
2. Tested: Test out the migration ourselves, first-hand, as an engineer.
3. Gamed out: We pretend we are one or two key customers and try it out as a role play.
4. Adapt: If it becomes clear that the plan is insufficient, then fix it.
5. Communicate: Develop a plan for how to proactively communicate the change to customers.

That all happens prior to work getting prioritized for the change.

Competition

We track competitors' capabilities and adjacent (or commonly integrated) products in Google doc Competition (private).

Intake process

Intake for new product ideas (requests) happens at the 🗣 Product Feature Requests meeting.

At the 🗣 Product Feature Requests meeting, the product team weighs all requests. When the team weighs a request, it is prioritized or put to the side.

The team prioritizes a request when the business perceives it as an immediate priority. When this happens, the team sets the request to be estimated or deferred within five business days.

The team puts a request to the side when the business perceives competing priorities as more pressing in the immediate moment.

Why this way?

At Fleet, we use objectives and key results (OKRs) to align the organization with measurable goals. These OKRs fill up a large portion, but not all, of planning (drafting, wireframing, spec'ing, etc.) and engineering capacity.

This means there is always some capacity to prioritize requests advocated for by customers, Fleet team members, and members of the greater Fleet community.

Note Fleet always prioritizes bugs.

At Fleet, we tell the requestor whether their request is prioritized or put to the side within one business day from when the team weighs the request.

The 🗣 Product Feature Requests meeting is a recurring ritual to make sure that the team weighs all requests.

Making a request

To make a request or advocate for a request from a customer or community member, Fleet asks all members of the organization to add their name and a description of the request to the list in the 🗣 Product Feature Requests Google doc. Then attend the next scheduled 🗣 Product Feature Requests meeting.

All members of the Fleet organization are required to attend the 🗣 Product Feature Requests meeting. Requests will be weighed from top to bottom while prioritizing attendee requests.

This means that if the individual that added a feature request is not in attendance, the feature request will be discussed towards the end of the call if there's time.

All 🗣 Product Feature Requests meetings are recorded and uploaded to Gong.

PFR Cleanup

Each week the DRI for the 🗣 Product Feature Requests meeting resets the document to blank by doing the following:

1. Create issues for accepted items
2. Notify absent requesters of decisions
3. Move that week's feature requests to the backup journal document

Usage statistics

In order to understand the usage of the Fleet product, we collect statistics from installations where this functionality is enabled.

Fleet team members can view these statistics in the Google spreadsheet Fleet usage available in Google Drive.

Rituals

Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) engage in the ritual(s) below at the frequency specified.

Ritual	Frequency	Description	DRI
🗣 Product feature requests	Weekly (Tuesdays)	We make a decision regarding which customer and community feature requests can be committed to in the next six weeks. We create issues for any requests that don't already have one.	Mo Zhu
🗣️ Product feature requests prep and cleanup	Weekly (Tuesdays)	Every week a backup doc is created to accompany the 🗣️ Product Feature Requests event	Mo Zhu
🗣 Product office hours	Weekly (Thursdays)	Ask questions to the product team	Mo Zhu
Sprint release notes kick-off meeting	Triweekly (Wednesday)	Communicate high-value features from the current sprint to prepare release blog post and drumbeat social posts, etc in the leadup to release at the end of each sprint. Marketing is responsible for getting what they need to publish and promote the release, including a great release post. Product is responsible for helping marketing understand what is coming early enough that there is time to prepare.
⚗️✨🗣 Design review (MDM)	Daily	Review designs from the MDM team	Noah Talerman
⚗️✨🗣 Design review (CX)	Daily	Review designs from the CX team	Zay Hanlon
⚗️✅🎉Product confirm and celebrate	Weekly	Product teams gets together to review work completed	Mo Zhu
⚗️ Sprint release notes kickoff	Tri-weekly	Product provides recommended features to highlight for the current sprint to enable the Marketing team to start writing release notes	Mo Zhu

Slack channels

This group maintains the following Slack channels:

Slack channel	DRI
#help-product	Mo Zhu
#g-mdm	Noah Talerman
#g-cx	Zay Hanlon