Customer Success

The Customer Success department is part of the GitLab Sales function who partners with our customers to deliver value and positive business outcomes throughout their journey with GitLab

The Customer Success department is part of the GitLab Sales function who partners with our customers to deliver value and positive business outcomes throughout their journey with GitLab.

The team can be reached in Slack channel (internal only).

Mission Statement

To deliver value to all customers by engaging in a consistent, repeatable, scalable way across defined segments so that customers see the value in their investment with GitLab, and we retain and drive growth within our enterprise customers.

  • The mission of the Customer Success Department is to provide these customers with experience in order to:
    • Accelerate initial customer value
    • Maximize long-term, sustainable customer value
    • Improve overall customer satisfaction & referenceability
    • Maximize the total value of the customer to GitLab

Vision Page

The “Customer Success Vision Page” provides the long-term view of company wide success to which the customer success will be building in partnership with the value centers of the GitLab organization (i.e., Marketing, Sales, Product/Engineering, Support, Finance and IT).

Department Initiatives

Our large and strategic customers are in need of an ongoing partnership that combines expert guidance with flexibility and adaptability to support their adoption and continuous improvement initiatives.

These customers expect that partner to provide a streamlined, consistent and fully coordinated experience that encompasses the full span of their needs as well as the fully lifecycle of the relationship. Need to focus on 4 main areas in order to grow in our existing accounts as well as land large and strategic:

  1. Awareness
  2. Adoption
  3. Usage
  4. Performance

Initiative: Awareness

Opportunity to improve the overall awareness of GitLab in order to promote and evangelize our brand and solution in a meaningful way to provide big business impact to our customers so that they believe in our vision and strategy.

Initiative: Adoption

Ensuring paying customers are successful in their onboarding in order to gain adoption and get the most out of our platform and remain happy, paying GitLab team-members and brand advocates.

Initiative: Usage

Collecting and making use of customer data and insights is key to customer success. It’s important to do more with data and when necessary share back with customers, which in turn helps and encourages our customers to improve and drive adoption.

Initiative: Performance

Utilizing built-in monitoring instrumentation and a scalable HA architecture, the Customer Success team helps ensure implementations of GitLab are operating at peak performance as organization scale and adopt more features.

Customer Success Playbooks

See the Playbooks Page

Customer Terrain Mapping Engagements

Terrain Mapping discovery engagements provide customers with the benefit of GitLab’s experience with DevOps methodologies, Git, GitLab, CI, CD and monitoring by brainstorming a high level, first draft discovery of the elements of a success plan to address various challenges. They are also mapped to professional services that can help with some of the elements identified in the engagement.

See the Terrain Mapping Engagements Page

Customer Success Groups

Solutions Architects

Professional Services

Customer Success Managers

Renewals Managers

Demo Systems

Account Team

The account team is comprised of the Strategic Account Executive/Account Executive, Solutions Architect (Enterprise), and Customer Success Manager.

More information about the account team

Overlap Between Solution Architects and Customer Success Managers

SA owns 1) pre-sales technical evaluation and relationships prior to the initial sale and 2) tier upgrades and new business units (i.e., connected new) within an existing customer. CSM owns 1) post-sales customer relationship and 2) license upgrades within an existing customer.

More information on the transition and ownership between Pre-Sales and Post-Sales

Other Resources

Education and Enablement

As a Solutions Architect, Customer Success Manager, or Professional Services Engineer, it is important to be continuously learning more about our product and related industry topics. The education and enablement handbook page provides a dashboard of aggregated resources that we encourage you to use to get up to speed.

Customer Workshops

2021-01 Skills Exchange Enablement on Customer Workshops

CSM-Created, Enablement Focus:

SA-Created, Hands-On Focus:

Using Salesforce within Customer Success

Visit this page for more info on using Salesforce within Customer Success.

Using Gainsight with Customer Success

Visit this page for more information on using Gainsight within Customer Success.

Dogfooding

Outside of Engineering the Customer Success team has the largest concentration of tooling development capability. The team has unique needs that can’t always be solved by GitLab’s single DevOps platform. However, it is important to dogfood and avoid dogfooding anti-patterns. As a result the Product organization heavily weights internal customers when considering prioritization. If you are considering building tooling in support of Customer Success priorities outside of GitLab, please follow the dogfooding process.

Customer Success AWS Test Account

In an effort to keep AWS spend down, initiatives are being taken to automatically clean up our AWS account. This account is primarily used as a proof of concept for IaC and creating demos for GitLab customers. An automated cleanup script is currently being tested that will tag, shutdown and delete old resources as they are no longer needed. The automation will:

  • Turn off and Tag Un-named resources. When resources are created a “Name” tag should be created with a value that’s meaningful and indicates who deployed the resource. Example: {initials}-GitLabRunner
  • New Resources will be automatically tagged with a Discovered and Expiration tag.
  • The Expiration tag is 14 days after the discovery. The script will only a tag an instance once. If you need additional time, please change the date to a reasonable date for cleanup (Add a month or two for prospective customers).
  • If a resource needs to be permanent please set termination protection on the instance. This should also include tagging the instance with an explanation on why it’s permanent and what its for.
  • On expiration the resource will be shut off and left for 7 days.
  • In 7 days if the instance is still off a snapshot will be taken and it will be terminated.
  • If the instance is still on but the expiration has not been changed it will be terminated.

Customer Success Tools and Scripts

By customer or internal request, we sometimes develop tools to automate certain GitLab tasks using the API. The resulting tools and scripts are publicly available for everyone to use and contribute to in the GitLab CS Tools group. Note : Those tools are not supported by GitLab Support.

Communities of Practice

Community of Practice are cross-functional groups of SME’s (or aspiring to be!) within the CS organization dedicated to a topic within GitLab or the broader DevOps space. The goal is to build assets, best practices, demonstrations, and share experiences we learn from prospects and customers. In turn, CoP will build broader technical depth within our CS organization to better advise our customers and influence our product roadmap.

Anyone can establish a Community of Practice, and anyone can be a part of one. To be efficient and transparent, we have set guidelines on how Communities of Practice should operate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Customer Success team members maintain a FAQ to keep questions customers ask documented in a place where everyone can view and contribute to.

Other Sales Topics

Customer Success Meetings

Customer Success has a few standing meetings:

  • All CS Team Call - Monthly on the first Thursday
  • CS Skills Exchange - every other Wednesday, alternating between 7:30am PST and 11am PST
  • Quarterly Reverse AMA with Sakamoto and Female+ Team Members

The different groups within CS also have standing meetings, including meetings for the SAs, PS, and CSMs groups, regional groups, and social calls.


Account Team
The account team works together to drive value, success, and growth for a customer
APJ Customer Success
The APJ Customer Success department is part of the GitLab Sales function under the WW Customer Success organisation who partners with our large, mid-market and strategic customers to deliver value throughout their GitLab adoption in the code development lifecycle. The team can be reached in WW Customer Success Slack channel (internal only). Further to that, the APJ Customer Success team also communicates via our Slack channel (internal & private only) amongst themselves.
Commercial Sales - Customer Success
The Commercial Sales segment consists of two sales teams, Small Business (SMB) and Mid-Market (MM)
Customer Health Scoring
Customer Account Scoring overview and methodology framework to improve our understanding of the customer's journey and their ROI attainment.
Customer Success Management Handbook
The Customer Success Management team at GitLab is a part of the Customer Success department, acting as trusted advisors to our customers and helping them realize value faster.
Customer Success Playbooks
View the Customer Success homepage for additional Customer Success handbook content. Customer Success playbooks assist in selling, driving adoption, and ultimately delivering more value to customers via GitLab’s DevOps platform. The below playbooks will include original content as well as links to other parts of the handbook. Structure of Playbooks Procedure: Each Playbook contains the outline of steps to position, apply discovery questions, lead value discussions, and drive adoption (CSM only).
Customer Success Reporting and Dashboarding framework
This page describes the underlying philosophy and framework for how to consider and build toward the long term goal of effective and efficient reporting and dashboarding
Customer Success Vision
Create a company-wide customer success approach, providing an engagement framework for the Customer Success organization
Customer Success' Frequently Asked Questions
Customer Success FAQ Charter Team members in Customer Success face questions from customers every day about a variety of topics related to GitLab. In an effort to maintain GitLab’s values of collaboration, results, efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, iteration, and transparency, we are collectively updating this FAQ as a Customer Success team with questions received by customers, in the hope to help other GitLab team members (both iin and out of Customer Success), our customers, and our wider GitLab community.
Customer Terrain Mapping Engagements
Customer Terrain Mapping Engagements Customer Terrain Mapping Engagements provide customers with the benefit of GitLab’s experience with DevOps methodologies, Git, GitLab, CI, CD and monitoring by brainstorming a high level, first draft discovery of their specific challenges that need to be addressed for success in a scoped area of DevOps (a Terrain). The need for this generally arises when the customer is getting ready to utilize technologies and/or methodologies they are less familiar with.
Customer Workshops
Please reference the Workshops section on the Customer Success page for up-to-date information on and links to CS Workshops.
Demo Systems
The GitLab Demo Systems provide infrastructure for the GitLab Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, and Training teams to demonstrate GitLab features, value propositions, and workflows in a variety of asynchronous and live capacities.
Educational Services
GitLab Product Training for Customer Success
As a Solutions Architect, Customer Success Manager, or Professional Services Engineer, it is important to be continuously learning more about our product and related industry topics. This handbook page provides an dashboard of aggregated resources that we encourage you to use to get up to speed.
Initiatives
Partners
Product Usage Reporting Vision
The page outlines the current and planned utilization of operational data at GitLab, including Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing.
Professional Services Team Handbook
The Professional Services team at GitLab is a part of the Customer Success department helping customers achieve value faster.
Public Sector
Renewals Managers
Resources to get started with GitLab
A 5-day plan to get started with GitLab
Solutions Architects Handbook
Solutions Architects (SA) are the trusted advisors to GitLab prospects and customers during the presales motion, demonstrating how the GitLab application and GitLab Professional Services address common and unique business requirements
Transitioning Accounts from Pre-Sales to Post-Sales
How to effectively transition a customer from the pre-sales engagement to post-sales to ensure the customer is successful.
Using Salesforce within Customer Success
Using Salesforce within Customer Success (Current) Account Onboarding Customer Success Manager Summary Account Triage Account Engagement On an account view in Salesforce, there is a Customer Success section, with the following fields: Health Score - A field to record the overall customer health CSM Sentiment - A field to list the CSM’s sense of the customer’s health GitLab Customer Success Project - Where you enter the URL of the project created using the template described above Customer Slack Channel - A field to record Slack channel(s) used for internal and external customer collaboration.