Product Direction - Product Analysis

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Product Analysis Group Overview

The Product Analysis group consists of a team of product analysts. This group reports to the Director of Product, Growth and serves as a specialized analytics team to support product data analysis requests. The primary customer this group serves is Product Managers from various sections/groups.

Product Analysis Group members

Manager, Product Data Analysis: TBH
Dave Peterson: Senior Product Analyst
Nicole Galang: Product Analyst
Product Analyst: TBH

The Product Analysis group is part of the Product Analytics Fusion Team where the product analysts work closely with members from the central data team, including:

Mathieu Peychet: Senior Data Analyst
Kathleen Tam: Staff Data Analyst

Responsibilities

Since the Product Analysis group is a specialized analytics team, it collaborates with the Data team and Product Intelligence group very closely. Here is a quick summary of the responsbilities of each of these 3 teams:

Team Name	DRI	Goal	Example Tasks
Product Analysis group	Manager, Product Data Analysis (TBH)	Perform analysis to unlock product insights when the data is available	Ad hoc product analysis, experiment analysis, Product KPI tracking, and creation and maintenance of standardized Product metric dashboards
Product Intelligence group	Keanon O’Keefe: Senior PM, Product intelligence	Define and improve capabilities of product data set	Make sure our product data set is comprehensive, available, and accurate,and that team members are enabled to create new instrumentation, charts, and dashboards in a self-service fashion
Data Team	Rob Parker, Senior Director, Data and Analytics	Build and maintain product data models and infrastructure to support data analysis	Create repeatable and reliable product data sets & models & related data pipelines/processes

Note that due to the strategic importance of product data analysis and how early we are in the journey, the data team and product analysis team formed a Product Analytics Fusion Team. The fusion team will take on some shared responsibilities in data analysis, data modeling and knowledge transfer/training for the foreseeable future, to progress our product data capabilities.

For more information about how the Product Analysis group works with the ata team at GitLab, please refer to following the model below and the data team's handbook page

High level Collaboration Workflow between the 3 teams

A data question needs to be answered with product data, the requester opens a data issue
The data triager decides whether we have the data avaliable to answer that question
If we don't have the data, open an issue for Product Intelligence Group
If we have the data, route the requests to the Product Analysis Group
Product Analysts perform analysis and build draft charts or dashboards
Product Analysts define if the data analysis needs to be repeatable
If the data analysis needs to repeatable, open an issue for data team to create trusted data model to enable future analysis

Intake Process

Issue Submission Process

For all product analysis requests, please create an issue on data project, and add a “product analysis” label and your section and group labels. If the issue is for an experiment, use the Experiment issue template(view template) within the GitLab Data Team project and fill in all relevant fields.
All data issues with “product analysis” labels will appear on a product analysis board
In the issue, please explain the urgency/criticality of the requests and provide as much context as possible
The Director of Product Growth will help prioritize the work based on importance/capacity and work closely with the Chief Product Officer and VP, Product Management on trade-offs if needed

Issue Prioritization Process (To be completed by the Product Analysis team)

The product analysis group works on a 2-week milestone cadence
Prioritization to be set during the planning meeting the week before the start of the new milestone
Prioritization labels will be added to reflect the issue's impact and urgency
Issue will be assigned an estimated projected time commitment
New issues will be considered alongside existing issues to set prioritization for the upcoming milestone, adjusting task load based on past milestone performance.

Capacity

As the Product Analysis team is still fairly new and small, we expect most PMs to self-serve analysis and only create data issues on critical asks

Slack

data-product-analytics-fusion-team - For the Product Analytics Fusion Team
data - For general data questions

Product Analysis Group’s Current Focus Area

As the Product Analysis Group was established in FY 21 Q4, the team is still in the process of forming. In FY22 Q1 and Q2, we will focus on the following areas:

Analysis Tasks

Knowledge transfer from the Data team to the Product Analysis group on product KPIs such as SpO and xMAUs
Work with the Data team to understand and improve data models powering product KPIs
Perform ad-hoc analysis to support product analysis requests, including:
- Product KPIs: SpO & xMAU
- Product Key Review & executive/OKR support
- Growth Experiments Analysis & New User Conversion Analysis

Team and Process

Hire for the open positions and get new product analysts onboarded
Understand team velocity and establish and improve the prioritization process
Establish collaboration process with the data team and product intelligence group