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.
Last reviewed: 2023-01
The GitLab Fulfillment section creates seamless commercial experiences for our customers by investing in our order-to-cash systems. Our goal is to make it easy for customers to purchase, activate, and manage their GitLab subscriptions. By making it easier for customers to transact and manage their subscriptions, we increase customer satisfaction and improve our go-to-market (GTM) efficiency. Improving our GTM efficiency helps our team to accelerate revenue growth and helps GitLab scale as a company.
Fulfillment currently spans seven groups and 10 categories. We frequently work with Field Operations, Enterprise Applications, Billing Ops, Support, and Data.
If you have feedback on our direction we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to propose an MR to this page and assign it to @ofernandez2 for review or open a Fulfillment Meta issue.
Provide customers with an excellent experience by making it easy for them to purchase GitLab paid subscriptions, provision the features they pay for, and manage any subscription changes needed such as increasing seat count, purchasing consumables, and renewing their subscription.
GitLab paid plans offer rich feature sets that enable customers to build software faster and more securely. For the Fulfillment section, success is to make it as easy as we can for a customer to transact with GitLab, pay the appropriate fees, and unlock the value of these rich feature sets in our paid plans.
To do this, we strive to make our subscription purchase and management process simple and support our customer's preferred purchasing channels, as well as their preferred payment methods. Delivering this vision requires investments across all interfaces where customers conduct business with GitLab. Given the breadth of countries, organization sizes, and industries that benefit from the GitLab product, we strive to be excellent at both direct transactions via our web commerce portal or our sales team, as well as sales via Channels and Alliances.
Our vision is to improve operational efficiency by providing a seamless end-to-end experience. This enables our Sales teams to spend more of their time on accounts with high LAM. It also allows our Support and Finance teams to be more efficient.
We have faced significant headwinds as we made progress in our Fulfillment systems. We are working on a series of projects to improve things moving forward.
| Challenge | How to improve | Lessons Learned |
|---|---|---|
| End of availability of Bronze/Starter added significant complexity to our systems without corresponding investment in our foundations. This complexity led to significant time and effort going towards fixing and patching up issues even now that we are 1+ years from the launch. | Invested heavily in simplifying the EOA custom code between 2022-04 and 2022-09, hopefully eliminating bugs and edge cases. | Invest in automation a robust systems first. We aligned with C-suite leadership on not repeating complex offers without first investing in robust long-term solutions for ramp deals (WIP). |
| The launch of quarterly subscription reconciliations (QSRs), auto-renewals, cloud licensing, and operational data bundled together many significant changes. This bundling led to slower adoption of Cloud Licensing and significant confusion of whether opting into QSR was required for Cloud Licensing. | Significant field re-enablement and investments in Cloud Licensing adoption as part of 2022 Cloud Licensing Adoption efforts. | Get better at iteration within Fulfillment. Simplify and reduce scope as much as possible for every change. |
| Our current billing model optimized for our legacy (pre-cloud licensing) system which favored strict enforcement of seat overage reconciliation at the self-managed instance level. As we transitioned to cloud licensing, we kept aspects of that strict enforcement that has caused significant GTM inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction. | We've relaxed seat overage validation logic and true-up overage logic in GitLab 14.3+. For Cloud Licensing customers we further reduce the seat checks at activation time and err on reconciling overages at the next QSR. | Continuously look for opportunities to reduce complexity, particularly as we add new systems and services. |
| Any significant changes to Fulfillment systems has an impact on, and must be coordinated with, many cross-functional teams. | We are investing heavily in reducing system complexity and aligning data architecture across systems to reduce errors and cognitive load as teams move across systems. | Proactive quarterly planning and review by other stakeholders, stronger program management. |
In FY23, we took a deliberate approach to slow down new feature development in favor of improving the foundations of our systems and addressing pain points with existing functionality. This will continue into FY24 as we continue to improve our system foundations.
Over the next 12 months we are focusing on the following investment themes:
GitLab has traditionally had limited offerings - 2 paid tier plans that apply to all seats in a provisioned instance/group, and 2 consumable add-ons. Moving forward, we'd like to enable other pricing and packaging options. Details of this work are limited access.
In FY24, we will focus on the following areas to make it easier for customers to purchase a GitLab subscription.
An increasing number of customers begin their GitLab journey via a partner. They may transact in a cloud provider's marketplace or purchase GitLab as part of a software bundle via a distributor. Our goal is to ensure those customers and partners get as high a quality of service as they would buying direct. This means extending our APIs to support indirect transactions and collaborating closely with our counterparts in Channel Ops, Finance, and Enterprise Apps to design solutions that extend our internal systems beyond their direct-sales use cases. We plan to create more visibility and flexibility for our customers and partners to manage GitLab subscriptions.
For more details on this work, reference the Commerce Integrations group's direction page and roadmap in Groups.
Currently, we maintain separate pathways for a new SaaS subscription purchase, a new self-managed subscription purchase, purchasing a storage add-on, and more. We also maintain purchase pathways for personal namespace add-ons, were we no longer support paid plan purchases. In FY24, we seek to simplify the purchase experiences by investing in a consolidated, best-in-class purchase path for our various offerings.
Our investments in using GitLab.com single sign-on as the login method for customers.gitlab.com open up the possibility for more streamlined purchase experiences across SaaS and SM without relying on building experiences within the GitLab product.
For more details on this work, reference the Purchase group's direction page and roadmap in Groups.
We want to take the complexity out of understanding GitLab's pricing so that a customer can easily understand and manage their subscription usage and how it relates to billing. A key gap we have is tracking seat usage over time, which we plan to address in FY24 by investing in our seat usage visibility work.
As we roll out namespace Storage limits on SaaS, we are working to ensure that namespace storage is easy to understand and manage for all SaaS users.
We also plan to invest in user caps for groups to help SaaS customers better manage their paid subscription seats.
For more details on this work, reference the Utilization group's direction page and roadmap in Groups.
In FY23, we made significant progress in migrating a large number of our GitLab self-managed subscriptions to use Cloud Licensing. In FY24, we will build on this foundation to continue to improve a customer's ability to provision their subscriptions.
Areas of investment in FY24 include:
For more details on this work, reference the Provision group's direction page and roadmap in Groups.
Managing a GitLab subscription should be simple and largely automated. In order to make this a reality for all customers, we are investing in:
For more details on this work, reference the Billing & Subscription Management and the Fulfillment Platform groups' direction pages and roadmaps in Groups.
GitLab team members are passionate about delivering value to our customers. To contribute to this, Fulfillment will invest in several initiatives in FY24 to improve the effectiveness of our internal teams.
As we complete these investments we will reduce the complexity of our order-to-cash systems, making it easier to innovate and deliver improvements to GitLab customers and our internal stakeholders across sales, billing, and more.
For more details on this work, reference the Fulfillment Admin Tooling and the Fulfillment Platform groups' direction pages and roadmaps in Groups.
Our latest roadmap can be seen within the GitLab product: Fulfillment Overall Roadmap
We also have Fulfillment FY24 Plans and Prioritization (Not Public), that internal team members can reference to track all planned initiatives by theme.
To learn more about our roadmap prioritization principles and process, please see Fulfillment Roadmap Prioritization
| Group | Description | Roadmap | Categories |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing and Subscription Management | The Billing and Subscription Management group is responsible for providing customers with an easy, informed, and reliable experience to view and manage their subscriptions, billing details, and contacts. | Roadmap | Billing & Payments, Subscription Management |
| Commerce Integrations | Commerce Integrations manages the buying experience for customers provisioning instances through third-party distributors and marketplaces. | Roadmap | Commerce Integrations |
| Fulfillment Admin Tooling | The Fulfillment Admin Tools team works with internal teams to build robust systems that enable our internal, customer-facing teams better support our customers. | Roadmap | Fulfillment Admin Tooling |
| Fulfillment Platform | Fulfillment Platform maintains and evolves our underlying order-to-cash infrastructure, including integrations with Zuora to help accelerate our goals as a section. | Roadmap | Fulfillment Infrastructure, CustomersDot Application |
| Provision | The Provision group is responsible for provisioning and managing licenses across self-managed and SaaS (including Cloud License activation/sync and provisioning of legacy licenses). | Roadmap | SM Provisioning, SaaS Provisioning |
| Purchase | The Purchase group is responsible for optimizing the web-direct purchase experience, with a focus on first orders. | Roadmap | Purchase |
| Utilization | The Utilization group endeavors to capture and deliver usage data to internal team members, prospects, and customers so that they can make the best decision for their business needs. | Roadmap | Subscription Cost Management |
Team members can reference our Fulfillment FY24 Q1 OKRs (Not Public).
We follow the OKR (Objective and Key Results) framework to set and track goals quarterly. The Fulfillment section OKRs are set across the entire Quad.
Older OKRs, tracked in OKR issues in Fulfillment Meta
Fulfillment performance indicators are captured in the internal handbook.
See Fulfillment Recap issues in Fulfillment Meta for recaps of recent milestones and the associated accomplishments and learnings.