GitLab Duo Planner

GitLab Duo Planner is a specialized AI agent that assists with product management and planning workflows in GitLab. It helps you organize, prioritize, and track work more effectively because it combines:

• Product management expertise.
• Awareness of GitLab planning objects, like issues and epics.

Use GitLab Duo Planner when you need help with:

• Prioritization: Applying frameworks like RICE, MoSCoW, or WSJF to rank work items.
• Work breakdown: Decomposing initiatives into epics, features, and user stories.
• Dependency analysis: Identifying blocked work and understanding relationships between items.
• Planning sessions: Organizing sprints, milestones, or quarterly planning.
• Status reporting: Generating summaries of progress, risks, and blockers.
• Backlog management: Identifying stale issues, duplicates, or items needing refinement.
• Estimation: Suggesting relative sizing or effort estimates for work items.

Access GitLab Duo Planner

Prerequisites:

• You must be working in a project, not a group.
• During the beta, GitLab Duo Planner is in read-only mode.

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.

2. Open an issue, epic, or merge request in your project.

3. In the upper-right corner, select Open GitLab Duo Chat (). A drawer opens on the right side of your screen.

4. From the New chat () dropdown list, select Duo Planner.

5. Enter your planning-related question or request. To get the best results from your request:

   • Provide context about your request, like URLs, filter criteria, or scope.
   • If you have a preferred prioritization framework, specify it.
   • If the agent’s assumptions don’t match your workflow, ask for clarification.

Example prompts

• “Help me prioritize issues in my backlog with the label (insert label name)” using the RICE framework."
• “Use MoSCoW to categorize features with the criteria (insert criteria) based on customer impact.”
• “Which of the bugs with a “boards” label should we fix first, considering user impact?”
• “Rank these epics by strategic value for Q1.”
• “Help me prioritize technical debt against new features.”
• “Compare these features (insert URLs) using an effort versus impact matrix.”
• “Which child items on this epic should I remove from the current scope to meet the deadline?”
• “Break down this initiative (insert URL) into key features we need to deliver.”
• “Create user stories for this epic (insert URL) with acceptance criteria.”
• “What tasks are needed to implement this user story?”
• “Suggest a phased approach for this project: (insert URL)”
• “What would be the MVP version of this feature? (insert URL)”
• “Identify which features are required for version 1, and which are optional, and explain why: (insert URL)”
• “Suggest how to organize these 20 issues (insert filter criteria) across Q1 sprints.”
• “What work should we defer in this epic (insert URL) to reduce scope?”
• “Review this backlog (insert filter criteria) and identify items that need refinement.”
• “How should we sequence the features in this initiative? (insert URL)?”
• “Group these issues into logical release themes: (insert URL)”
• “Generate an executive summary of this epic’s progress: (insert URL)”
• “Draft release notes based on issues assigned to (insert relevant milestone or iteration).”
• “Write a stakeholder update on this initiative’s health: (insert URL)”
• “Summarize blockers and mitigation plans for leadership: (insert URL)”
• “Find stale issues that haven’t been updated in 6 months.”
• “Identify duplicate or similar issues in this project.”
• “Which issues are missing estimates or assignees?”
• “Identify orphaned issues with no parent.”
• “What issues have missed their due dates?”