Hi Atlassian,
I would like to suggest an opportunity for improvement of internal Atlassian processes:
This RFC was first published on October 15, with rollout targeted a month to a month and a half later. Based on what I infer about Atlassian’s internal processes, this means that at the time of publishing of the RFC, I have to guess that the feature was already completely designed, resources were already budgeted, allocated and scheduled, and that the implementation was presumably well underway.
This makes this RFC effectively an announcement rather than an RFC: the major decision has already been made, the detailed trajectory has already been plotted, significant resources have already been expended, the feature is relatively close to release, and it is unclear if any real feedback is being sought. The RFC does not include the standard “Actions” section (the part where Atlassian explains what it particularly wants to hear about from the ecosystem community), and the fact that this section is empty/absent is telling.
If the stated goal of an RFC is to have “early collaboration with our Ecosystem”, then this one missed the mark.
If Atlassian publishes a RFC but the comments can do nothing to influence the trajectory of the RFC, you risk alienating your ecosystem partners because commenting seems futile. A better time to launch this RFC would have been when the PM was first thinking about implementing a checklist feature and wanted to understand the impact on the ecosystem, before actually building it.
To avoid the risk of the RFC format feeling like a rubber-stamp checklist item for future projects (at least from the point of view of ecosystem partners), can the RFC requirement be moved to be a gating item early in the feature design/change management process, rather than something that apparently can occur at the tail end of a project?