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Learn how we’re managing feature releases and establishing best practices within and across teams at GitHub using GitHub Projects.
As a product manager working across multiple engineering teams, I spend a lot of time planning out and tracking the work involved for our upcoming releases to GitHub Projects. Each release comes with a set of cross-functional tasks that need to be completed, such as providing public documentation and performing a phased rollout, and there are many teams and stakeholders that need to be kept up to date of progress along the way to ensure it is successful.
To best collaborate across diverse teams, we use GitHub Projects to plan, manage, and provide updates for each release right next to our code. Project templates allow us to standardize our process and create a reusable framework to ensure the success of each release, with status updates keeping stakeholders informed of progress along the way.
Creating and using project templates ensures each upcoming release can get off the ground running quickly and is smooth sailing all the way to general availability. We don’t want to spend time manually setting up a new project or creating tasks for each release (given there are a lot of them!), so we build templates to track repeatable tasks and establish best practices for our teams.
There are two kinds of templates we use to get started:
While we have created templates that our teams use for our own feature release management, let’s dive into how teams across all of GitHub are utilizing project templates!
At GitHub, we build project templates to standardize our workflows across the organization and create consistency within and across teams, with a growing collection of over 50 templates that we have built to help us accomplish our repeatable tasks. Some of these templates include:
Our template collection at GitHub continues to grow and expand to more use cases across teams and departments, so it’s one click and you’re off!
I use our “Product Feature Release” template to plan out and manage each upcoming release, so once we have officially kicked off and are working through our issues and pull requests, I want to make sure that all involved teams and stakeholders are kept in the loop on the progress along the way. To do this we use project status updates to keep everyone aligned on how the release is progressing, when it is expected, and any risks that we should be aware of, all in a single place in the project.
Status updates allow us to provide short and regular summaries on the progress of the release, such as the Status, Start date, and Target date. We tend to provide additional high-level details such as:
@ mentions.By providing regular updates, we have a feed of history so our stakeholders can follow along and understand why the target date shifted, why it shifted from On track to At risk, or what the cross-functional dependencies are.
I can then see the status of all of my relevant work and projects all in a single place, so I can drill in to understand more details.
We are continuing to build our collections of project templates at GitHub to help us standardize our processes across teams, spanning from feature releases, employee onboarding, and building and sharing our roadmaps. We encourage teams and organizations to build their library of project templates to help establish and share best practices, and share status updates on their projects to easily communicate progress of those tasks with their teams and stakeholders all in a single place.
Harness the power of GitHub Projects. Learn more or get started now.