Main Takeaways: - Create a foundation to empower teams - Vision, values, strategy, and structure - Reward outcomes over output - Framework, principles, OKRs, and performance indicators - Optimize the value exchange - Sensing mechanisms, customer discovery, jobs to be done, iteration, and continuous delivery

1. Continuously Innovate: GitLab's Approach
to PM by GitLab Sr PM
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5. 1
Innovating at scale:
Exploring GitLab’s Approach To Product Management

6. 2
About GitLab
● Single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle.
● Open core business model.
● Delivered as self-managed or SaaS.
● Built in the open alongside our customers and the wider community.
● 1,357 team members distributed across 68 countries.
● Became a unicorn towards the end of 2018 with the most recent secondary
valuing the company at $6B.
● One of the most amazing companies and wider community that I’ve come across
in my professional career.
● Material in this presentation was sourced from our public handbook and a
few additional public sources.

7. 3
What we’re going to
cover...
Create a foundation to empower teams | Mission, values, vision,
structure, and strategy
Reward outcomes over output | Performance indicators, OKRs,
principles, and framework
Optimizing the value exchange | Sensing mechanisms, customer
discovery, jobs to be done (JTBD), iteration, and continuous delivery

8. 4
Create a foundation to empower teams.

9. 5
The architecture of a company is the
precursor to great products.
●
● A company is a dynamic system composed of
thousands of feedback loops. A product is no
different.
● “The most powerful ways to influence the
behavior of a system is through its purpose
or goal. That’s because the goal is the
direction-setter of the system, the definer of
discrepancies that require action, the indicator
of compliance, failure, or success toward
which balancing feedback loops work.” --
Thinking In Systems
“
https://thesystemsthinker.com/reinforcing-and-balanci
ng-loops-building-blocks-of-dynamic-systems/

10. 6
Mission & BHAG
● Everyone knows exactly what we are
trying to achieve.
● There is a clear problem to solve that
can be quantifiably measured.
● There is a specific timeframe in which it
needs to be solved.
https://about.gitlab.com/company/mission/#mission

11. 7
● Everyone has clear guidelines on the type of behavior expected as we work towards solving
the BHAG.
● Serves as a framework for distributed decision making.
● Enables individuals to determine what to do without asking their manager.
● We treat our values as a “living document” based on lessons learned in the course of doing
business.
● Each core value has many subvalues to clarify what a given core value means and looks like at
GitLab.
● Values help overcome the five common organizational dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of
conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values
Values

12. 8
Vision
● Breaks the mission down into
approachable 10 year increments.
● Serves as the aligning mechanism
between the Mission and the Strategy.
● Creates a common understanding of
what everyone is hoping to accomplish
together.
● Enables teams to globally optimize their
products while keeping the focus on
delivering customer value.
https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#vision

13. 9
Structure
Stages
Groups
Categories
Features
Section
Owned by a single, autonomous cross-functional team.
High-level capabilities that may be a standalone product at another company and
typical aligns to market categories defined by analysts.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/

14. 10
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/
My group

15. 11
Strategy - Open Core Flywheel
● A flywheel strategy is defined as one that
has positive feedback loops that build
momentum, increasing the payoff of
incremental effort.
● Driving force is that by using a DevOps
platform to replace multiple point solutions,
GitLab customers can achieve cost savings
and efficiency gain.
● When we develop more features to
improve the product maturity, it becomes
easier to replace point solutions and
GitLab will attract more users.
● The more users, the more contributions
from the Wider community and the faster
it spins. https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy

16. 12
Strategy - Dev Spend Flywheel
● Advantages of a single application leads to
more Stages per Organization (parts of
GitLab our customers apart).
● Open source stewardship leads to
Wider community contributions.
● Captures the relationship between merge
requests (MRs), changes in ARR from one
period to the next, hyper growth R&D
spend, and the resulting impact on MRs.
● More MRs increase stage maturity, which
drives more monthly active users and
stages per user, which in turn drives
more seats and more revenue which
funds R&D spend that leads to more
MRs. https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#flywheel-with-two-turb
os

17. 13
Reward outcomes over output.

18. 14
Performance Indicators
● Maps to our flywheel strategy of
increasing total users (MAU), Stages
per Organization (SpO), Category
Maturity Advancement.
● Performance indicators map user behavior
to business outcomes.
● Product Manager’s success is based on
hitting their performance targets, not for
what they ship. Monthly Active Users also
encourages optimization of the entire
lifecycle (acquisition to retention).
● Rolls up along our structure from the
bottom to the top. (Feature MAU >
Category MAU > Group MAU > Stage
MAU > Section MAU > Company MAU)
https://about.gitlab.com/company/kpis/

19. 15
Monthly PI Reviews
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/dev-section-performance-indicators

20. 16
Category Maturity
https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/

21. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product-development-flow/
17
Objectives & Key Results
(OKRs)
● Equips product teams with strategic
context to make good product decisions
on how to approach solving the problem.
● Provides product teams with a problem
to solve rather than a feature to build.
● Empowers the product team to take
responsibility for achieving the
outcome.
● The more ownership the product team
has, the more likely they are going to
iterate until the solution produces the
desired outcome.
● Enables alignment on cross-cutting
concerns.

22. 18
Product Principles
● Our principles reinforce the vision by
stating the values and beliefs on which
the many important product decisions
are based.
● Sets expectations while empowering
product managers to work autonomously
with their team.
● Helps maintain a consistent product
experience with very little coordination
or overhead required.
● Our product principles are complimented
by dozens of more detailed examples to
communicate what it means to practice
them at GitLab.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/product-principles

23. 19
Framework - Our Product Development Flow
“Big” ideas Minimum Viable Change (MVC)
Did this improve my Performance Indicators?
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product-development-flow/

24. 2
Optimizing the value exchange.

25. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/escaping-the-build/9781491973783/ch01.html
21
The Value Exchange
● This is also a dynamic system
composed of many feedback loops
● Good products deliver more value than
they capture in return.
● The rate at which you deliver value via
your products or services determines
the rate at which you can capture value
in return.
● Product managers must optimize both
value delivered and value captured in
return.

26. 22
Sensing
Mechanisms
● At GitLab, Product Managers are the
Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)
for deciding what our engineers work
on.
● There are dozens of inputs that help
us determine what to build and
prioritize.
● Collecting and synthesizing these inputs
is where PMs spend most of their time.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/product-processes/#sensing-mechanisms
Sensing
Mechanisms
Customer Interviews
Product usage data
Public issue tracker
Customer support
Analyst relations
Sales calls & demos
Competitors
System Usability Surveys

27. 23
Jobs To be Done
● All of the input from our sensing
mechanisms enables create Jobs To Be
Done (JTBD) for each of our product
categories.
● These map directly to our customers
needs, wants, and problems.
● The JTBD are validated and scored with
actual customers via UX research at
regular intervals, which determines the
maturity of a given category.
● They are also living documents that
change as we learn more about our
customers.
● We also document JTBD that we haven’t
started solving for as a way to https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/

28. 24
Customer Discovery
● Formal processes we use extensively during
problem or solution validation in collaboration
with our UX Research stable counterparts that
are assigned to our product group.
● Informal processes like participating in a sales
call or collaborating on customer support
tickets.
● All customer discovery information from all
teams is transcribed, categorized, and
captured in a single location which is
accessible to all product managers for
self-service as they are working on the
direction for their categories.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/ux-research-training/pro
blem-validation-and-methods/

29. 25
Iteration
● What’s the smallest, fastest way to
deliver value to our customers?
● Making small changes with quick
feedback loops reduces the risk of
introducing a new feature where the
value doesn’t justify the long-term
costs of maintenance.
● Increases the rate at which value can be
delivered to customers, which enables us
to get feedback on what we need to
build next and how to capture more
value from our customers.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/product-processes/#cra
fting-an-mvc

30. 26
Continuous Delivery
● We plan work to help coordinate with other
departments on GTM strategies and our formal
monthly release cycle.
● We deliver completed units of customer value
continuously to our production environment.
● Leverage feature flags to selectively enable new
features to targeted customers or internal
stakeholders.
● GitLab Next (canary) environment is open to all
GitLab SaaS customers.
● Decouples engineering delivery from
marketing efforts. Faster feedback.
● Automated, incremental roll-out to all
customers on SaaS when we are ready to
make something generally available. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/introduction/

31. 2
Linking it all
together.

32. 28
Continuous Delivery
Validate & Iterate
Category Maturity
Monthly Active
Users
Open Core Flywheel
Dev Spend Flywheel
Vision
Mission & BHAG
Principles, Structure, PIs, Framework
Strategy, KPIs
Values
Value Exchange
Sensing
Mechanisms

33. 29
Thanks!
Connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to ask
additional questions or or give me feedback.
linkedin.com/in/gabeweaver/
P.S. GitLab is hiring Product Managers ;)
Apply here → https://grnh.se/293c9ea12us

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