Our cadences and scheduled work are available to the public, and we encourage anyone to submit new issues.
Use the public #product channel to have open discussions about product priorities. Use the private #internal-product channel for non-public product discussions.
You should feel comfortable reaching out to any of us either in issues or on Slack if you have questions about these product areas.
The Product team will review any new issues in the Meltano group on a daily cadence and organize appropriately with labels and priority.
Product is responsible for reaching out to users and talking with them about their experiences with all Meltano properties. This is an important sensing mechanism for understanding how users interact with Meltano and it informs product priorities. We aim for an average of 4 user interviews per month at a minimum.
When evaluating a new major piece of work, we create an exploratory issue and use an opportunity assessment (some people call this “Market Requirement Doc” or MRD) to ask the following questions:
The opportunity assessment was created by Marty Cagan at Silicon Valley Product Group
Each item on the roadmap will be linked to an OKR.
On the first and third monday of the month, the Head of Product and Head of Engineering will meet to validate the current state of the roadmap. This will be a high-level discussion around progress on current items and negotiation on inclusion of items for current and upcoming months. They will also discuss spike-worthy itmes and add the appropriate labels as needed.
Key questions to ask are:
Issues that are related to Roadmap items should have the Roadmap label.
When any work needs to be prioritized that is not specifically a roadmap featue, use the following process.
content reviewneeds-engineeringMarketing PriorityIf you want to make an improvement to Meltano you don’t have to wait for Product approval, kick-off some long convoluted discussion, or worry about stepping on anyone’s toes. Submit a Pull Request (PR) with your proposed changes and we can iterate from there.
Sometimes, it can feel like we are choosing between two important things and this can be painful. However, we take the approach that anything is technically possible to build on the Meltano team so it’s a just a question of the order of operations. On a long enough timeline, we will do everything we put on the roadmap – so keep writing issues and hold onto that “it’s an AND, not OR” mindset.
The Meltano product team uses monthly cadences to track work. There are 12 cadences in the year.
A new cadence starts on Wednesday of the 3rd full week of a given month. June 21, 2023 was the start of Cadence 6 for 2023.
The Changelog is a new feature that has not yet been implemented in the docs. It will be live in July 2023.
At the end of the cadence, an update to our Changelog in the docs will be added. We will highlight any new releases across Meltano, Cloud, Hub, the SDK, and the EDK. Important new features will be given context and possibly include a screenshot or GIF of the feature in action.
On or just prior to the start of a cadence, Product will record a video walking through the items on our roadmap that are scheduled for that particular cadence. This will primarily be an internal facing video, but we will experiment with uploading to YouTube.
Prior to this call, there will have been lots of discussion with the engineering team on initial scope and capacity across the Meltano properties.
This section is dedicated to tracking interesting open source projects that we want to keep an eye on that we don’t already have plans to integrate with. This article from BVP is useful as well.
Additionally, there are many “git for data” tools tracked in this spreadsheet. Project Nessie is another option not listed in the sheet.