The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
This page introduces the GitLab product vision, where we're headed over the next few years, and our plan to deliver over the next year. It complements our GitLab Mission, Vision, and 3-Year Strategy.
Our vision is to replace DevOps toolchains with a single DevOps platform that is pre-configured to work by default across the entire DevOps lifecycle. We believe our vision is shared by market analysts who have coined it the Value Stream Delivery Platform market.
Many organizations are in the midst of evolving from classic development paradigms to DevOps. They want faster cycle time, improved efficiency, and reduced risk. GitLab’s purpose is to help those organizations accelerate their DevOps journey. Examples of how GitLab does this include:
GitLab facilitates remote work transformations as highlighted in this customer's story, enabling people to commute less, spend more time with family and friends, and get great jobs from anywhere. Using GitLab as a single DevOps platform reduces the toil of working across multiple systems, which can otherwise lead to silos and lack of transparency. GitLab also improves working relationships between teammates by improving collaboration, and enables higher quality software development projects which increases job satisfaction. As evidence of this, one of our customers told us they use GitLab as a talent acquisition tool, suggesting that while the recruit may make more money elsewhere, their professional quality of life will be higher in a software development environment leveraging GitLab.
We execute on our vision rapidly and efficiently by leveraging the best practices of 100,000 organizations co-developing the DevOps platform of their dreams. We take a seed then nurture approach to maturing our product surface area over time, all the while, focusing on customer results. We leverage sensing mechanisms and product usage data to make decisions about where to increase or decrease investment. You can read more about the principles that guide our prioritization and product thinking in our product handbook.
The following 6-minute video gives a quick overview into where the GitLab product is headed the next few years.
Continuing apace after Microsoft's 2018 acquisition of GitHub, the trend to consolidate DevOps companies seems here to stay. In January 2019, Travis CI was acquired by Idera, and in February 2019 we saw Shippable acquired by JFrog. Atlassian and GitHub now both bundle CI/CD with SCM, alongside their ever-growing related suite of products. In January 2020, CollabNet acquired XebiaLabs to build out their version of a comprehensive DevOps solution.
It's natural for technology markets go through stages as they mature: when a young technology is first becoming popular, there is an explosion of tools to support it. New technologies have rough edges that make them difficult to use, and early tools tend to center around adoption of the new paradigm. Once the technology matures, consolidation is a natural part of the lifecycle. GitLab is in a fantastic position to be ahead of the curve on consolidation, as we're already considered a representative vendor in this newly defined market, but it's a position we need to actively defend as more competitors start to bring legitimately integrated products to market.
DevOps is a broad space with a lot of complexity. To manage this within GitLab, we break down the DevOps lifecycle into a few different sections, each with its own direction page you can review.
We are investing in the following manner across each stage.
GitLab competes in a large market space, with a TAM estimated at ~$18B in 2024. GitLab has recently surpassed the $150M ARR milestone, with unusually high revenue growth and retention rates. GitLab is uniquely positioned in the market with a vision to offer a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. GitLab competes across numerous market segments and aims to deliver value in 80+ market categories. GitLab’s product vision is uniquely ambitious, as we were the first DevOps player to take a single application approach. From idea to production, GitLab helps teams improve cycle time from weeks to minutes, reduce development process costs, and enable a faster time to market while increasing developer productivity. With software “eating the world,” this is widely viewed as a mission-critical value proposition for customers. We also have a number of tailwinds in the form of cloud adoption, Kubernetes adoption, and DevOps tool consolidation, which are helping fuel our rapid growth. Finally, GitLab has an open source community and distribution model, which has exposed the value of GitLab to millions of developers and has sped up the maturation of our product through more than 200 monthly improvements to the GitLab codebase from our users.
See this graph in Sisense, which shows the high correlation of the first 30 days Stages per Organization (SpO) for free groups to 90 day paid conversion. Conversion more than triples as stages two and three are added, and more than doubles when the fourth stage is added.
As outlined in this user journey, the most important additional stages for customers to adopt are Create to Verify and Verify to Release, as each of these adoption steps open up three additional stages to users.
GitLab CEO and Product leadership discuss the Product Strategy in detail during a CEO Handbook Learning Session.
Every product should have a single job that it strives to do. At GitLab we use the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework. A JTBD is the reason why people employ a product. GitLab's overarching Job to be Done is:
When we are building software as a team, we want to get from ideas to production with quality, reliability, and security quickly and within budget, so that our organization can deliver promised value and achieve our business outcomes.
Personas are the people we design for. We’ve started down the path of having developers, security professionals, and operations professionals as first-class citizens; letting each person have a unique experience tailored to their needs. We want GitLab to be the main interface for all of these people. Show up at work, start your day, and load up GitLab. And that’s already happening.
But there are a lot of other roles involved with the development and delivery of software. That is the ultimate GitLab goal - where everyone involved with software development and delivery uses a single application so they are on the same page with the rest of their team. We are rapidly expanding our user experience for Designers, Compliance Managers, Product Managers, and Release Managers. We’ll also be expanding to the business side, with Executive visibility and reporting. While we’re still calling it DevOps, we’re really expanding the definition of DevOps and delivering it all as a single application.
Every year at GitLab, we choose some specific areas of emphasis to help guide the teams on the directional themes that we want to accentuate in our product. This section is used to highlight that emphasis. It is not a comprehensive list of everything we plan to do this year. Direction for each stage and category can be found at the respective direction pages. We are not asking the teams to deviate from their core mission.
Many teams will see themselves contributing to these areas of emphasis directly. The other teams will continue to execute on their mission - that is also important.
The themes are to help facilitate cross-team collaboration when invariably teams working on the 1-year themes may need to collaborate with others. Our guidance is: if any team approaches you to prioritize something that is thematic for this year, consider that as a higher priority than you would normally - as it is in service of the broader product-wide goal that we, as a company, have deemed important to accomplish this year.
For FY22, the 3 key product themes we are focused on are:
Performance Indicator: Total user growth for Ultimate
As part of our land-and-expand strategy, we consider Application Security Testing (AST) a critical land play after SCM and CI. We will take a leadership position within the AST market as we build on our FY21 success and extend the AST offering to meet the most demanding customer requirements.
We will establish a leadership position within the Application Security Testing (AST) market by moving Static Analysis (SAST), Dynamic Analysis (DAST), and Dependency Scanning categories to Complete maturity, as well as moving Vulnerability Management to Viable maturity. In addition, we will introduce a Fuzz Testing category and bring it to Viable maturity.
Our single application for the DevSecOps lifecycle allows Developers and Security professionals to collaborate in ways natural to them, but with unprecedented effectiveness. Developers can find vulnerabilities at the time of code commit, making it easier to fix them without context switching. This leads to acceptance and adoption by developers. In addition, Security professionals gain visibility into vulnerabilities at the time the code is committed and when modifications, approvals, and exceptions are made. They can also enforce security policies in the merge request flow.
The end result is that organizations that adopt GitLab benefit by:
Performance Indicator: Increase in Predicted TMAU
The key to unlocking the power of a single application is to have customers experience the value of multiple stages working together. We believe that improving usability is our primary path to unlocking multi-stage adoption.
We will focus on making features more discoverable, working by default, and usable. If we can do this successfully, new users will be more likely to buy, current customers will be more likely to add seats and uptier, and the customers will maximize the benefit they can extract from using GitLab.
Key areas of focus:
A single application for the DevOps vision isn’t new. What is new is our approach to it. Others who attempt this try to stitch together point products after the fact (either through M&A or a “solution kit” exercise).
The key difference between stitching point products together vs a single application comes down to seamless interconnections between the stages, so that the product effortlessly moves from one job to be done to the next. All personas feel like they have an ability to connect and collaborate with each other in the same space and don’t have to maintain separate integrations and data systems simply to do their job.
McKinsey conducted a five-year study on the business value of design which showed top-quartile companies increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over a five-year period. McKinsey found that top-quartile companies experienced 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS growth for the period as a whole.
Many users of GitLab start and end their working days with GitLab. They spend a lot of time with our tools to get their work done. If we make the experience delightful, we have a meaningful opportunity to enhance their quality of life. It's a win, win, win. Win for our customers, win for GitLab, and a sense of pride/win for us as builders.
Performance Indicator: Increase in Paid GMAU for gitlab.com
GitLab-hosted First does not mean GitLab-hosted only. We are committed to our Self-managed as well as GitLab-hosted customers. Our software architecture has a single unified codebase that allows us to serve both deployment models without the additional burden other vendors may have because they chose to create different software stacks for hosted and Self-managed offerings.
This year, we place emphasis on strengthening our GitLab-hosted offering by delivering the most critical requirements for GitLab-hosted customers and driving towards feature parity with our market leading self-managed offering.
We have north of 800K SaaS MAU.
IDC projects that SaaS-based delivery of DevOps tools (26.4% 2019-2024 CAGR) will overtake on-premise/other software (7.1% 2019-2024 CAGR) by 2022.1 This represents a large and urgent opportunity for GitLab, which has an estimated 9% usage-share of the cloud hosted Git repository market, based on Bitrise repository counts, compared to our 67% usage-share of self-managed Git solutions
Additionally, IDC predicts that the market for SaaS-based DevOps tools (38% of the market in 2019) will overtake on-premise/other software (62%) by 2022 and account for $10.3B in revenue (or 58% of DevOps software tools market) by 2024.1 As a result, over this time period we expect to see an increase in existing self-managed users migrating to GitLab.com, as well as the majority of prospective customers preferring SaaS over self-managed deployment.
We have two-thirds of the usage-share of self-managed Git solutions. We will provide a compelling onboarding experience to ensure that we are able to serve our customers on SaaS just like we do on Self-managed.
When developing features and capabilities, we will provide them on GitLab-hosted as well as Self-managed. If faced with a choice to deliver it on one deployment method first - for example, Self-managed first, GitLab-hosted next or vice versa - we will choose GitLab-hosted First and Self-managed next.
We have also added a new GitLab-hosted parity product principle to help clarify this.
In addition we will focus on
GitLab is not immune to disruption. In some ways, it is a sign of success that GitLab is now at a scale where we have to think about low-end disruption. Arguably, a few years ago, GitLab was a low-end disruptor.
Clayton Christensen defines low-end-disruption as follows:
Low-end disruption refers to businesses that come in at the bottom of the market and serve customers in a way that is "good enough." These are generally the lower profit markets for the incumbent and thus, when these new businesses enter, the incumbents move further "upstream." In other words, they put their focus on where the greater profit margins are.
Our perspective is that low-end disruption is an additional and critical sensing mechanism. This is especially true for the DevOps market. We look at the following attributes to figure out if a low-end disruption has anything close to potential product-market resonance. This list is an adaptation of the Product Zeitgeist Fit.
A reason low-end disruptors are able to enter the market is that the feature-absorption by users is lower than the feature-velocity of the established vendor. To address this we are focused on a working-by-default configuration principle.
As we add new categories and stages to GitLab, some areas of the product will be deeper and more mature than others. We publish a list of the categories, what we think their maturity levels are, and our plans to improve on our maturity page.
We strive to be the best product in the market and to be truly lovable. As the market, customer needs, competitive landscape, and technology change, we should expect our maturities to also change, including changing to a lower maturity rating. By embracing a focus on improvement and low level of shame, we encourage moving a maturity down. This is a strong indicator that we are realists about our product with an eye on achieving the best results for our customers.
We try to prevent maintaining functionality that is language or platform specific, because they slow down our ability to get results. Examples of how we handle it instead are:
Outside our scope are Kubernetes and everything it depends on:
During a presentation of Kubernetes, Brendan Burns talks about the four Ops layers at the 2:00 mark:
GitLab helps you mainly with application ops. And where needed, we also allow you to monitor clusters and link them to application environments. But we intend to use vanilla Kubernetes, instead of something specific to GitLab.
Also outside our scope are products that are not specific to developing, securing, or operating applications and digital products.
In scope are things that are not mainly for SaaS applications:
We expect GitLab to continue to grow, and we have several ideas for possible future stages
To make sure our goals are clearly defined and aligned throughout the organization, we make use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Our quarterly Objectives and Key Results are publicly viewable.
GitLab's direction is determined by GitLab the company and the code that is sent by our contributors. We continually merge code to be released in the next version. Contributing is the best way to get a feature you want included.
On our issue tracker for CE and EE, many requests are made for features and changes to GitLab. Issues with the Accepting Merge Requests label are pre-approved as something we're willing to add to GitLab. Of course, before any code is merged it still has to meet our contribution acceptance criteria.
At GitLab, we strive to be ambitious, maintain a strong sense of urgency, and set aspirational targets with every release. The direction items we highlight in our kickoff are a reflection of this ambitious planning. When it comes to execution, we aim for velocity over predictability. This way, we optimize our planning time to focus on the top of the queue and deliver things fast. We schedule 100% of what we can accomplish based on past Development Department merge request rate and availability factors (vacation, contribute, etc.).
See our product handbook on how we prioritize.
On our releases page, you can find an overview of the most important features of recent releases and links to the blog posts for each release.
GitLab releases a new version every single month on the 22nd. You can find the major planned features for upcoming releases on our upcoming releases page or see the upcoming features for paid tiers.
Note that we often move things around, do things that are not listed, and cancel things that are listed.
Developing and delivering mobile apps with GitLab is a critical capability. Many technology companies are now managing a fleet of mobile applications, and being able to effectively build, package, test, and deploy this code in an efficient, effective way is a competitive advantage that cannot be understated. GitLab is taking improvements in this area seriously, with a unified vision across several of our DevOps stages.
There are several stages involved in delivering a comprehensive, quality mobile development experience at GitLab. These include, but are not necessarily limited to the following:
We have more details about our plans on the Mobile direction page. Some of our older thoughts are collected in the original epic.
Right now, GitLab doesn't use any ML/AI technologies in production features, but we expect to use them in the near future for several types of problems. This is the focus of our new Learn stage.
We set big hairy audacious goals that may take a long time to deliver. Because of this, we leverage Single-Engineer Groups to adequately explore a new space, build rapid Interactions, and grow a community around the problem space. Below is a list of areas where we are putting some longer term bets.
