gwx-oss / product

Program-level artifacts, workflow and issues for cloud.gov

cloud.gov Product Management

Program-level artifacts, workflow and status for delivery of products within the cloud.gov umbrella

What is cloud.gov?

cloud.gov is a set of tools designed and supported by US government workers, for US government work. cloud.gov's mission is to reduce the barriers to rapid, incremental, compliant, secure, and scalable delivery of government services for all government agencies by leveraging best-of-breed modern practices in an opinionated way.

Teams

• Platform - #cg-platform

  • The Platform theme aims to keep a solid, dependable, tested, and proven platform up and running strong for everyone in government to use. This includes a lot of automation; infrastructure-as-code is the key theme.
  • "cloud.gov" refers to the cloud.gov Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which is cloud.gov's first product. The PaaS provides a comfortable abstraction which handles cloud-based operations and greatly reduces the complications of infrastructure management for delivery teams. Our PaaS builds on the widely-used and open source Cloud Foundry, deployed with practices geared toward meeting strict government compliance requirements.
  • Includes activity related to the FedRAMP authorization of cloud.gov. Compliance auditing and pen-testing activities are coordinated here, as well as necessary remediation that results.

• Customer - #cg-customer

  • Make infrastructure and deployment self-service and easy to use, and ensure people can find answers when they need them.
  • Encompasses all the user- and tenant-facing features of cloud.gov. That includes UX for web UI, billing workflow, as well as overall design, branding, IA, and integration in our customer-facing presence.
  • Designing the customer experience of cloud.gov from a prospective customer's inquiry about the product through a new customer's onboarding and early use. This includes ongoing user research to understand customer needs and to improve customer interactions, content strategy (including content development and information architecture for our website) to educate customers about our offerings, and other work related to evangelism and training.

The business unit (BU), which, in addition to guiding cloud.gov's business-related decisions, acts as the "front-office" for our customers and stakeholders. The BU consists of cloud.gov's Director and Deputy Director and represents the product in direct communication with customers as they progress from the what-is-this-thing to the productively-using-the-platform-on-their-own stage.

Other notable Slack channels

• #cg-support
  • Support-related questions and discussion
• #cg-business
  • Business-related questions and discussion
• #cg-compliance
  • Compliance-relatd questions and discussion

Joining and leaving our team

New contributors should check out our Onboarding guide and checklist to get productive quickly. The team follows an Offboarding checklist to clean up access when people leave.

Delivery Process

We document the processes that govern the delivery of our work, which is shared (and potentially embellished) with themes in other repositories. Our process is revised periodically when we reflect on common patterns observed across retrospectives.

Wiki

We maintain a wiki with information including product background, key research findings, and design principles.