Thanks for asking. If you get back on the same pace after 3 months it would be acceptable. However I think this unlikely. From the linked page https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/#how-do-we-keep-shippi... "Don't ever slow down because it is very hard to recover from that. As soon as you stop shipping (for a big refactor, a security initiative, etc.) it is very hard to get back op to the old speed. The organization has accepted a slower rate and there are always enough reasons to go slower. You have to do the refactors and other things during the course of business, never slow down."

I think this is probably wrong. You need customers to love the product. Polish matters. Which is why github/slack is still used and loved more than bitbucket/hipchat.

Velocity for sake of velocity is not going to result in customer delight

I agree polish (user experience) is very important in winning people over. We think the worst user experience is between product categories in the DevOps lifecycle. Having to switch between JIRA, GitHub, circleCI, Artifactory, Ansible, and New Relic. We want to create a better flow. Therefore we have to balance polishing what we have with completing out vision of a single application for the DevOps lifecycle.

I'd love to use GitLab Issues over JIRA, but Issues is just so feature poor. I don't even need a complex bug tracker, but Issues doesn't solve any problem I can see, except very simple lists.