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: 2022-09
The GitLab Fulfillment section is responsible for creating 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 is currently divided into six established groups:
In the near future, we plan to establish a dedicated group to focus on Fulfillment Admin Tools
We collaborate frequently across all of GitLab to achieve our goals. Most commonly we work with Field Operations, Enterprise Applications, Support, and Data teams.
If you have any feedback on our direction we'd love to hear from you. Feel free and raise an MR, open an issue, or contact Omar Fernández
Provide customers with a consistently great 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 our 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, support our customer's preferred purchasing channels, as well as their preferred payment methods. Delivering on 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.
By providing seamless experiences, our vision is to improve operational efficiency, enabling our Sales teams to spend their time on accounts with high LAM, and enable functions like Support and Finance to spend less time manually supporting customers and our field teams.
We have faced significant headwinds as we seek to make progress in Fulfillment systems.
To address these challenges, we are taking a deliberate approach to slow down new feature development in favor of improving our systems foundations and addressing pain points with existing functionality.
To achieve our mission, over the next 12 months we are focusing on the following areas:
All of these efforts help us support our Mission (/direction/fulfillment/#mission) to support our customers experience purchasing and managing their GitLab paid subscriptions.
Our ability to scale and innovate in the Fulfillment space will only be possible and accelerated if we invest in our systems and data architecture. To that point, we have identified a few key projects to complete in FY23 and FY24:
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.
Many new customers start with a small subscription or first order. A common example would be Alex (Application Development Manager) choosing to purchase GitLab for their team. Alex may work at a small startup or may be part of a sub-team within a large enterprise. Either way, Alex is looking for a quick, self-service way to get started with GitLab. By providing a simple and easy-to-use transaction experience we can get out of Alex's way and get them back to adopting newly acquired features.
In FY23, we began an effort to evaluate, procure, and integrate a vendor solution for subscription commerce and management. This will enable GitLab to provide internal teams and our customers with the benefits of typical e-commerce functionality, without building and and maintaining standard e-commerce and subscription management functionality that a vendor solution can provide. We will focus our team's e-commerce efforts on differentiated functionality that enhances what the vendor solution can provide. We will also enable other teams, such as Growth, to contribute more to our webstore experience.
As part of our efforts we also aim to provide more options at checkout and improve cohesion in our GTM self-service funnel. As one example: we want to enable promotions with discounts from a marketing campaign, making that experience seamless. This will help improve conversion and lead to a better overall experience transacting with GitLab.
To learn more about purchasing our efforts, see Purchase Direction.
With GitLab 14.1 we launched Cloud Licensing, which provides a foundation for an improved licensing and provisioning experience for our customers. For years GitLab was behind in modernizing our licensing systems and architecture; by building on the foundation of Cloud Licensing we will invest in further reducing friction in license management.
In FY23, we have focused on continuing to increase adoption of Cloud Licensing and the switch to strict Cloud Licensing, making Cloud Licensing the default way to activate GitLab self-managed instances.
Licensing and seat management gets more challenging for very large organizations. These large organizations often need to move large amounts of users in and out of GitLab each month, often across multiple instances. We are learning more about these challenges and will deliver solutions to help these customers easily manage provisioning across multiple instances in their organization. The goal is to ensure Sidney (Systems Administrator) and Skyler (Chief Information Security Officer) can easily set policies and provision seats, whether manually or via automated solutions such as LDAP syncs, to meet the evolving needs of their business.
To learn more about our licensing and provisioning efforts, see Provision Direction.
Customers need visibility into usage history and trends so that they can best manage their GitLab paid subscription. This includes tracking historical seat usage and activity to show when and by who seats were taken as well as visibility into consumption of storage or CI minutes. We will provide solutions to provide this visibility to all customers, including proactive alerting as customers reach their subscription plan limits, to make it easier for customers to predictably manage their GitLab subscription.
To learn more about our utilization efforts, see Utilization Direction.
Drive more self-service transactions
We will enable more transactions to be completed via the web store to focus our GTM team on higher-value activities. This may first benefit simpler transactions, but we will invest to support our entire customer base over time. For example, adding seats to an active subscription or purchase additional CI minutes should be easy and quick to complete digitally and fully self-serve.
As we enable more self-service transactions, we will provide the right visibility into all transactions so that both the customer and our customer-facing teams supporting them are aware of the relevant transaction history.
To ensure success in this area we partner closely with our VP of Online Sales & Self Service and their team. We are working together to map out customer journeys across sales segments, and allow customers to select whether they want to purchase self-service or would benefit from speaking to a sales team member.
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. In addition, we plan to invest in additional tooling to give our customers and partners better visibility and flexibility in managing GitLab subscriptions.
At the moment, Fulfillment is not investing in the following items:
We would like to do more in each of these areas, and will reassess efforts as we wrap up existing projects and/or grow our team size.
The Purchase group is responsible for optimizing the web-direct purchase experience, with a focus on first orders.
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The Billing and Subscription Management group is responsible for supporting sales-assisted purchasing, subscription management (e.g., reconciliation, auto-renewal, invoicing, payment collection), and more. The group's primary goal is to increase self-service purchase volume to 95.5%.
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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).
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See Provision Direction page for more information.
Newly established in FY23, the Fulfillment Platform team aims to extract the complexity of our underlying order-to-cash infrastructure to help other Fulfillment teams build features more quickly.
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NOTE: as of 2022-09 this group has not been established yet. Work related to Fulfillment Admin Tools is currently being managed by the Utilization Group.
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Our latest roadmap can be seen within the GitLab product by following these links:
We also have Fulfillment Roadmap Slides (Not Public), that internal team members can reference for executive reviews.
Across our stable counterparts, we follow four key principles to keep us focused on delivering the right results. These principles are not absolute, the intent is for them to guide our decision-making.
Make conducting business with GitLab seamless
When customers choose to purchase GitLab they've already decided to unlock additional value by accessing the features or services enabled by a transaction. We strive to make the transaction experiences fade into the background, helping customers unlock this additional value as easily as possible. This creates a better customer experience and results in accelerated growth for GitLab.
This means that in every initiative we question the need for complexity. We strive to build functionality that is easy to understand and use, and make sure it works flawlessly for customers of all types. As much as we can, we won't require a customer to speak to a sales representative and will allow them to choose whether to transact via online self-service tools.
Build a strong foundation so GitLab can scale
Fulfillment systems are the foundational layer for many commerce activities within GitLab. Our systems provision licenses for customers, are the source of data for multiple KPIs and data models, and interact directly with Zuora and Salesforce. These systems need to be reliable, scale with demand, and allow other teams to collaborate.
We regularly invest in our foundations and will continue to pause new feature development in favor of foundations whenever we feel that our foundational systems aren't robust enough. We established a Fulfillment Platform group in FY23 for focused efforts in this area.
Use data to make decisions and measure impact
We have many sensing mechanisms at our disposal: feedback routed via our GTM teams, meetings with business counterparts, customer feedback from user research, and improvement suggestions raised by GitLab team members and members of the wider community in our issue tracker.
We're also improving how we use data as a sensing mechanism to set direction and prioritization. Understanding our funnel is paramount in building a seamless commerce experience for our customers. Fulfillment teams in collaboration with Growth are instrumenting each point in our transaction funnels so we can use data to inform our strategy and direction.
Iterate, especially when the impact of a change is sizeable
Iteration is one of the most challenging values to follow, especially within Fulfillment. Oftentimes our work needs to be bundled and aligned closely with external announcements or communications. Even so, we strive to break work down as much as possible and decouple functionality releases from broader announcements. Doing this expedites delivering value to our customers and the business.
Minimize and remove business logic from the GitLab application code
In the past, we have embedded significant business logic into the GitLab instance code directly. For example, we have logic in our licensing system that checks at the instance level whether the customer license should be activated based on licenses paid for, etc. This causes significant issues as we evolve our business policies, which we can't then reflect in past GitLab versions that we support.
We will minimize such logic and remove it from the application code whenever possible, seeking alternative solutions.
Our roadmap is prioritized and scheduled following our Project management process. We aim to update this roadmap every month as a part of our milestone planning process.
To request work to be added to the Fulfillment roadmap, please follow our intake request process. Changes in priorities of this roadmap follow our prioritization process.
The source of truth for all Fulfillment projects is our in-product Fulfillment Roadmap.
By nature of our direction, Fulfillment works mostly on highly cross-functional projects where either or both of the following are true:
To focus on the most impactful work, Fulfillment’s prioritization process seeks to:
A project will be prioritized in the Fulfillment roadmap based on the considerations below.
All initiatives, regardless of who requests them, will be evaluated based on this same criteria.
Some initiatives will have a direct impact on these criteria, but others will have an indirect impact. We will consider indirect impact as part of the prioritization.
When scoping new solutions we will prefer those that best allow GitLab to scale and accelerate future work. These solutions often require more upfront foundational work, which we will include in the initial scope. In cases when we decide to accelerate a solution by skipping on some foundational work, we will add this foundational work as a separate line item to the roadmap.
A note on Customer Satisfaction: to understand the impact of efforts aimed at improving customer satisfaction, we should estimate the indirect impact of improving CSAT on revenue and cost. For example, by reducing the number of steps or improving the steps required to purchase we will see an increase in conversion rate and thus revenue.
Prioritization based on the established criteria will drive the order in which work is scheduled to be completed. The product team will review overall prioritization regularly. Before changing priorities, will consider:
To minimize impact and give more predictability to partner teams, we will minimize changes to initiatives that we’ve already agreed with cross-functional partners to do within the ongoing quarter.
Anyone can request new items to be added to the roadmap via an intake request.
One of our prioritization goals is to maximize overall team output across Fulfillment and cross-functional partners. We want to give transparency to all GitLab team members about the work that Fulfillment and its partner teams plan to deliver.
To enable this, we will do a roadmap review with our stable counterparts before the beginning of a new fiscal quarter. As part of this review, we gather feedback on roadmap priorities, update the roadmap based on the feedback, and agree with partners on the scope and delivery milestones for the upcoming 3-6 months.
During these quarterly reviews we will aim to commit up to 70% of Fulfillment’s engineering capacity for the upcoming quarter, and no more than 30% of capacity for the quarter after. This is meant to provide enough visibility into upcoming activities for cross-functional partners to plan for them while leaving room for reprioritization and changes as needed.
Any proposed changes to the roadmap will be first communicated to cross-functional partners async in a relevant Slack channel with the relevant context and rationale, and ask for feedback. As needed, a synchronous meeting will be scheduled to discuss. All feedback will be considered by the product team and a final decision will be made and communicated once made.
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.
To see our recent and past OKRs, see the 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.