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.
Product Operations (Product Ops) is a critical function of scaled, product-led organizations that aims to optimize the intersection of product management with cross-functional collaborators and stable counterparts across the business. High performing Product Ops teams increase efficiency, accelerate feedback loops and improve feature adoption by implementing workflows/systems to ensure alignment around the product from initial ideation through go-to-market and back to improvements prioritization.
There are 3 key benefits to having a Product Ops function:
Some typical responsibilities of Product Ops teams:
At GitLab, Product Ops enables the Product Division to operate more efficiently, and consistently across all groups, stages, and sections. We optimize and automate worflows, improve upon best practices, and scale how product management can consistently receive feedback and act on it.
We run Product Operations as an independent function under the "product umbrella". This allows the function to maintain a broad and unbiased view to develop strategies/tactics serving the product division as well as the whole business without favor toward any particular group. This approach enables us to build and maintain a product system that serves not just product managers but all our internal customers: UX/design, engineering and our go-to-market counterparts.
We aim to serve as the voice of the customer, pulling insights directly from users when possible and enabling direct communication between product managers and customers as frequently as possible.
We continually support GitLab in applying the following strategies and tactics:
As GitLab grows and matures, we strive to evolve Product Operations to flexibly support the shifting needs of the business and customers. We're the only Product Operations function that's always been all-remote and handbook first. This gives us the unique opportunity to transparently share how we run the Product Division and how it can scale its impact to dozens of teams and 100s of features delivered with each major release. We welcome GitLab users and the wider community to improve and evolve their Product Operations practices along with us by learning from and contributing to our public handbook. Everyone can contribute!
A world-class product system, that GitLab team members and the wider community can benefit from.
Empower GitLab to be product-led and customer-centered, by iterating on Agile/Lean best practices with a remote-first mindset, one MR at a time.
We embody all GitLab values, with a deep appreciation for collaboration. Product Operations is only as good as the sum of its contributions from the whole product development team and its stable counterparts. Teams that share accountability for (product) ownership invent better solutions and gain traction with less internal friction. These teams bond and rally around achieving a shared definition of success.
We prioritize results and efficiency by valuing outcomes over outputs. This mindset is propelled by our core product development flow, which rallies us around the goal of delivering business impact to GitLab's customers and users with every iteration. Anything that doesn’t contribute to this overarching goal is waste and will be removed from our product system.
We continually align around our product principles, with a focus on understanding the customer problem rather than assuming we know the solution. A single problem will have multiple solutions with varying impact potential. Customer-focused teams maximize value by prioritizing one problem to generate multiple solutions, rather than assuming a singular solution to solve multiple problems.
We build feedback bridges between Product and other teams, such as Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, UX/Design, and Engineering The most important success metric for any (product) team is the time it takes to move through the Think-Make-Check (or Build-Measure-Learn) cycle. Teams that iterate successfully and quickly through this cycle have continual access to qualitative and quantitative data through every phase of development and across every function in the business.
We support high-functioning, cross-functional teams by creating flexible frameworks that support confident decision making along with the permission to fail, which in turn fuels velocity. When teams have psychological safety, they are more likely to take risks and move faster, which ultimately leads to bigger ideas and better MVCs toward those ideas. These teams lose judgment in favor of trust.
Continuing GitLab's leadership in the "all remote" work revolution. While the Covid pandemic has given remote working an unexpected relevance and urgency for organizations worldwide, even prior to the pandemic remote working had begun taking precedence due proof around the core, repeatable benefits*:
As a successful all-remote organization, GitLab is already familiar with the benefits of workplace flexibility. We know that remote teams have the ability to move fast, in both parallel and non-parallel workflows, achieving optimal efficiency. And by dogfooding our own all-remote guide and all-remote cultural tips, we've demonstrated remote teams are not just more productive, but happier and more innovative when autonomy and ownership are combined, allowing a focus on goals/outcomes rather than hours/outputs to measure success. With remote-first working practices more at the forefront than ever, GitLab as an opportunity to continue leading by example, helping organizations across various industries, not just technology. We can help teams lose the disadvantages of in-office work, such as office politics. And we can help teams translate the benefits of in-office culture, such as the empathy that comes from human connection, to an all-remote environment. Product Operations will work cross-functionally to ensure GitLab's product team best practices are continually handbook first such GitLab and non-Gitlab teams can benefit from our learnings, in alignment with our value of transparency.
*Statistics reference via Forbes
Productizing our product development successes for the benefit of our users as well as the benefit of GitLab as a business. As an open core product, we have the unique advantage that what we build for ourselves at GitLab can be productized for our customers and improved upon by our users. This means that every strategy/tactic we leverage to optimize our internal processes, be it an automation such as release post item generator or workflow optimization such as scaling our release post, can and should be built into our product for our users. Building it into our product can be as simple as an update to our transparent and highly referenced handbook or iterating on our release feature over multiple cycles to optimize our release notes process. Product operations will treat all of Gitlab's product development practices, such as a product development flow, as a product to be optimized, dogfooding with the intention of improving existing or introducing new GitLab features to operationalize successful outcomes for the benefit of GitLab and non-Gitlab teams.
Finding the right balance of synchronous versus asynchronous collaboration as an all-remote team. GitLab has a unique culture of combined independence and ownership as a fully remote organization. We've carved the path for successful remote work with our transparent handbook first approach, which has also propelled a highly productive asynchronous team with an everyone can contribute mindset. However, as GitLab has gone from fewer than 350 to over 1200 employees, we've seen some of our asynchronous processes fail serve us at scale.
At scale, leaning too much toward asynchronous results in opportunity gaps to collaborate on optimal outcomes within and across teams, and even operational chaos. Too much synchronous communication creates the overly burdened "red tape" operational inefficiencies that traditional companies suffer from across large teams and various time zones. So as we grow our team and our userbase, we have to continue adjusting the levers to establish the right convergence and divergence points, for product development teams and across the business.
Providing access to actionable product usage data for GitLab product development teams As GitLab's userbase grows, collecting quantitative data to identify patterns and trends while leveraging qualitative data to better understand the reason behind those patterns and trends will be key to delivering meaningful impact to customers. However, GitLab is committed to user data privacy and respects user-requested boundaries on data collection. Alternatives to product usage data, such as user surveys and testing can help fill some of the gaps but are not as scalable or unbiased. And while leveraging product usage data from SaaS users can yield meaningful insights for Self-managed users as well, it's not always an apples to apples comparison. We need to continually work on finding the balance between user privacy and providing the product teams access to the business intelligence they need to deliver meaningful impact to customers. Concurrently, we need to minimize the complexity and manual nature of effort needed by product development teams to access the most meaningful data available to them in the system by prioritizing instrumentation and providing standardized dashboards for teams to leverage and customize.
Supports Outcome driven products
Automate the release post workflow to communicate product release notes more efficiently.
Why? Minimize the amount of work necessary for product managers to contribute to and manage their release notes.
How are we measuring success?
Improve design of release notes and related documentation such as deprecations, removals and migrations
Why? Make it easier for GitLab customers to discover new features and be informed of any product changes relevant to them.
How are we measuring success?
Supports Feedback loops
Automate deployment, data collection and analysis of post purchase survey to increase accuracy and efficiency.
Why?
How are we measuring success?
features.yml to 0Expand data types collected by post purchase survey to include web direct sales.
Why? To provide an additional sensing mechanism to product management for category direction, maturity and feature optimization and to inform investments in across marketing, sales and customer success teams.
How are we measuring success?
Supports Scaling product knowledge
Increase GitLab's footprint as thought leaders in Product Management and Product Operations.
Why? So GitLab customers and the broader tech community can benefit from and contribute to our best practices.
How are we measuring success?
/direction/product-operations/ from position 18 to position 10 in Google search resultsSupports Feedback loops
Identify a solution to collect survey responses from paid account self-managed users. (see pilot history here)
Why? To deternime a viable soultion to better understand the sentiment of self-managed users.
How are we measuring success:
Supports Scaling product knowledge
Redesign the L&D pages to be more interactive
Why? To help product managers to take advantage of the valuable and curated content available to them in the L&D to improve their product management skills at GitLab and beyond in thier careers.
How are we measuring success?
Supports Feedback loops
Implement a solution to collect survey responses from paid account self-managed users.
Why? To better understand the sentiment of self-managed users given they make up X% user population.
How are we measuring success:
*Redesign Product Handbook content to make it easier discover or find specific content types
Supports Scaling product knowledge
Why? So product managers, cross-functional team members and the wider GitLab community can find helpful references and workflow to due their job.
How are we measuring success?
Supports Scaling product knowledge
Increase GitLab's footprint as thought leaders in Product Management and Product Operations.
Why? So GitLab customers and the broader tech community can benefit from and contribute to our best practices.
How are we measuring success?
/direction/product-operations/ from position 18 to position 5 in Google search resultsSupports Scaling product knowledge
Increase GitLab's footprint as thought leaders in Product Management and Product Operations.
Why? So GitLab customers and the broader tech community can benefit from and contribute to our best practices.
How are we measuring success?
Supports Outcome driven products
Streamline the general and product management specific onboarding workflows to better compliment each other.
Why? Minimize the amount of time it takes for product managers to ramp up to perform their job successfully at GitLab.
How are we measuring success?
Supports Outcome driven products
Automate the release post workflow to communicate product release notes more efficiently.
Why? Minimize the amount of work necessary for product managers to contribute to and manage their release notes.
How are we measuring success?
Supports Feedback loops
Automate deployment, data collection and analysis of post purchase survey to increase accuracy and efficiency.
Why?
How are we measuring success?
The focus areas below are evergreen for Product Operations. One year plans to improve GitLab's product system always map to the areas of focus below.
We aim to minimize manual processes in favor of flexible automation that compliments existing human workflows. Doing so enables Product Division team members to operate more efficiently, spending more time delivering value to GitLab's customers and the wider community.
We lean into opportunities to grow internal and external communication channels for GitLab's product development teams and their stable counterparts. The outcome is the collection and exposure of actionable user feedback and data that can be utilized across the business to deliver impactful results to GitLab's users.
We collaborate to identify best practices for product development and create transparency of knowledge across teams in an ongoing and remote-friendly way. The outcome is a collection of written, video and interactive content in the GitLab handbook that is easy to consume and adopt for GitLab's product managers as well as product managers throughout the tech community.
The areas of ownership below highlight workflows and processes for which Product Operations acts as DRI.
The areas of advisement below highlight workflows and processes for which Product Operations continually acts as trusted advisor.
3 keys to success for product Operations
Product Operations welcomes contributions to this page! Please feel free to raise an MR and assign to the Product Operations for collaboration.