Product Direction - Product Operations

Product Operations Overview
- What is Product Operations?
- What is Product Operations at GitLab?
Product Operations Areas of Focus
Product Operations Resources

Product Operations Overview

What is Product Operations?

Product operations is an emerging function meant to support the scaling of product-led organizations with as little friction as possible. The role and focus of product operations can vary depending on business maturity, customer needs and the product itself. A good product operations function will define, communicate, and improve practices that can be standardized, such as tools, planning, team gatherings, and training. A great product operations function will sit at the intersection of product management, UX/design, and engineering to enable cross-functional teams to consistently, flexibly and creatively deliver outcomes to customers/users via strong feedback loops and process automation. An excellent product operations function will create and implement systems to continually drive partnership between product management and teams across the business, inclusive of marketing, sales and customer success, resulting in accelerated feedback loops, collection/exposure of critical data and improvement of feature adoption.

What is Product Operations at GitLab?

At GitLab, Product Operations strives for the good, the great and the excellent! We are in a unique position to not only define and lead what this newly emerging function can do for software companies, but to apply the strategies and tactics in the context of a highly technical, open core product with an all-remote, global team. This means that our definition of Product Operations won't just be ours. It'll be informed by millions of users, thousands of businesses, and hundreds of cultures, enabling us to build a truly diverse and inclusive product system that drives efficiency and results without the traditional boundaries that restrain most product development methodologies.

Vision: A world class product system, that GitLab and all of GitLab’s customers and users can benefit from.

Mission: Empower GitLab to be truly product-led and customer-centered, by iterating on Agile/Lean best practices with a remote-first mindset, one MR at a time.

Principles

We embody all GitLab values, with collaboration at the forefront. 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 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 support product management to constantly sit at the intersection of Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, UX/Design and Engineering by building internal and external feedback loops. 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 grow 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.
We prioritize outcomes over outputs by eliminating waste in our a dual-track, ongoing product development flow. The ultimate goal is delivering business impact to GitLab's customers and users. Anything that doesn’t contribute to this overarching goal is waste and will be removed from our workflows and processes.

Challenges

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.

Creating and maintaining a psychologically safe space as we grow our headcount. To date, GitLab has succeeded with a culture that is reasonably flat and values that promote level agnostic collaboration and contributions across the organization regardless of functional role. We've embraced a bias toward action, raising MRs to make micro improvements that can be quickly improved, revised or even removed, minimizing the fear of failure.

As we grow larger teams to support bigger enterprise customers, especially as an all remote team, it becomes more challenging to build human to human relationships within in and across teams to building trust and safety. And because every change we introduce into our system or into our product can have significant positive and negative impacts on thousands of our users, with real revenue ramification for larger customers, functional roles get more defined and the stakes become higher. This opens the door to hierarchy driven systems, competitively motivated behavior and fear based decision making, which don't promote risk-taking, voicing alternative opinions and creativity, which are the types of behavior that lead to innovative breakthroughs.

There is no one formula for this challenge, which all maturing organizations face. We'll have to continually lean into opportunities to build empathy amongst our teams by building frameworks to provide resources that foster positive emotions of curiosity, confidence, and inspiration.

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.