 Hello, John Jeremiah here with the GitLab strategic marketing with another update And I want to share a tip that we've been using around how we manage big projects ethics We have effectively an epic template approach that we can use to create Repeated epics that have similar sets of issues. It's a challenge. We've been wrestling with we've been building out a series of Efforts to go to market and we want to create epics to manage related work And let me show you what we were doing in GitLab and show you how we solved the problem So for for our use cases, which is customer use cases reasons why people choose to use GitLab Things like source code management or continuous integration We wanted to create a set of epics to manage the work to create the content the collateral and all the things we wanted to build out and so That became was going to be a challenge because as we were getting into this We realized that there was going to be a lot of different things we needed to do But we needed to do it Progressively and sequentially and we needed to do it over and over it's similar kind of work And epics are a great way of managing and structuring work and you can have an epic in this case You know, I'm in the parent level epic of this the use case go to market one I even have a link in here that points to the epic templates, which I'm going to show you how we do that and We then can see that within this epic. There are Four sub epics at the moment. There's GitOps source code management continuous integration DevSecOps Each of these then has more You know epics under them to break down the work and we broke it down We chose to break it down on a on a month-to-month basis as a way to pilot to try working this way And so if we look at continuous integration We broke each of these then down and so we could then see how that work compressed down So in the first epic of this we worked on They built a resource page. They had developed and we'll look at that issue Which went into creating that where? William and Parker worked on it together and we got double-click into that issue will go down to the to look at that now Just as a to level set Wait, that was the MVC to I want to go to the template view of this This was that was the second one they did on that. So let's go back to the first epic and Here was the first epic of creating the sales resource page Or the resource page and we had a set of tasks in here. We wanted to attach it to this To this epic and there's the associated merge request We have traceability from the initiative all the way down to the actual work down to the merge request where the change was Actually implemented along with any discussion that went into it So we have complete traceability end-to-end but the beauty of this and the power of this is that in this issue to create the sales Resource page. We have a similar issue for creating the source source code management resource page And so we have consistency, but it's different based upon the use case. So how did we do that? How did we create a series of related? Issues that all roll up into an epic that have the similar structure and discussion, right? So how did we create this model without doing lots and lots of manual work of changing things and and the cool Really powerful thing and get lab that we can do is you can import issues And when you import issues, you can import lots of detail about those issues And and we've and I've documented how you can do it as an epic template. So in this handbook page We've described how you can go through this process and if you I'll give you the link to this page at the end Which walks you through it? I'm going to summarize it the rest of this video of how it works, but effectively you basically go to issue import You use this guidance of importing issues from a common unlimited file, which shows you how to do it And it's very straightforward. It's very straightforward and it's also very very powerful And we're using it and we're using it as a way to do this So this describes the process of doing it of of how you set it up and that you can add labels due dates Milestones you can attach things and add them to epics you can set the weights You can even assign it to individuals All of that can be done from a common limited file of the input for example when I did this earlier for GitOps when we started working on that use case we created we took this template and we added here's the title of the of the Issue that was created to create that resource page and here's the markdown written in a Basically in a common limited file the markdown to create it where it's going to put the labels on it that we wanted It's going to attach it to a milestone It's going to attach it to an epic and then the next issue If we scroll down a little bit does the next set of steps of saying let's find customer references and the Specific tasks that would go into that with links all of that gets built into the issue So that way when we say let's do another use case the set of tasks are there and we can quickly update this format and Imported in without you having to do it all manually and it works remarkably well so this was the input from there and and basically the steps are quite straightforward you create a spreadsheet that has the Details of how you're going to do it The way I did this because I was going to do it multiple times is I I used addition and Concatenation when this describes how I concatenated elements and so I basically have a spreadsheet that has all the raw elements And it assembles the two columns you need the title and the description and that's what this Worksheet describes how I did that and if if anybody wants to see the raw spreadsheet I can I'd be happy to share that with someone if you reach out to me Right now it's but it is it is a little bit. There's a little bit of things going on to it where it's a bit fragile I've got to make sure I don't change anything. It's easy to break it. I do think there's some important tips and hints Before you do this test it in GitLab, you know, we don't really delete issues You can do it from the API, but as a user you just don't delete issues You can close them, but they'll still be there So before you import a hundred or two hundred or lots and lots of issues and make a mistake Create a project off the side of practice and make sure it's going to work the way you want it to do The other thing is use a real issue to draft any quick action codes. You're going to use Make sure that they would work in real life and then paste them into your spreadsheet That way your quick actions will work and you'll make sure that you don't have typos in them And so you just create one issue and open a comment and start to write your quick actions And then the last one is the order when the spreadsheet runs it will run an import from the first one to the last one So if you reverse the order of the spreadsheet Then when GitLab sorts them based on created date They'll be in logically in the right order. So that's a Tip that I at least I tried to do that on a couple of cases as I was doing it But back to managing the work when we look at this the nice thing now Is that when we look at this initiative around how we do go to market around use cases and build that out We can look at the roadmap view and we can see how how things are progressing We can get a sense as to where we're at on the different status of these Epics and then we can drill into the related issues associated with them. So powerful powerful capability by using Common to limited import and thinking about and planning in advance how you want things to be structured and how you want things to be related You can build out very powerful Sets of epics of related work if you want to learn more about this The page I was referencing where I showed how we set up the epic templates for strategic marketing is bit.ly GL-epic templates notice the uppercase and then if you want to read the documentation This link will take you to the issue import documentation bit.ly issue dash import That's it. If you have feedback, please feel free to open a merge request and contribute add to these handbook pages help make them better Be glad to answer questions if you have them you can catch me on Twitter You can ping me any way you like but with that good luck and please contribute Please share and thank you very very much