Maintained by:

Operational Data Vision

Vision

Leverage operational data (for example, license, active users, use cases, and features) from the product to:

Accelerate customers' realization of value from the GitLab platform and delivery to desired business outcomes with a world-class customer experience
Improve value, quality, and usability through data related to how customers interact with GitLab
Improve net dollar retention by efficiently retaining customers and assisting in account expansion

Benefits

Customer

Understanding a customer's use of the GitLab platform enables GitLab to:

Ensure expected value is delivered through the adoption of the GitLab platform
Monitor the customer's usage to ensure they are adopting licenses, use cases, and features to support their business objectives and goals
Provide data to support delivery to a customer's return-on-investment (ROI) proposal and/or justify additional investments
Continuously improve product value, quality, and usability by monitoring and understanding customer usage (for example, high and low usage of stages or features, user experience measurements, etc.)
Recommend best practices and enablement content that would help customers adoption and/or operationalize the platform capabilities
Identify and recommend additional features or use cases that would add additional value to the customer
Identify adoption issues, delays, or barriers to trigger assistance by GitLab team members or digital content
Proactively provide system-level support to help maintain uptime, resolve any system performance issues, and monitor for security issues

GitLab

The benefit to GitLab is based on the premise that customers will renew and expand if they realize continuous value with a positive experience and are able to achieve their business outcomes and goals with the platform. Additionally, the data can be used to:

Provide adoption insights to monitor and manage customer health and experiences
Measure quality of processes and methods like onboarding, enablement content, and adoption playbooks
Leverage customer health to manage account plans and assist planning and forecasting
Provide efficiency through automation in both CSM-led and digitally-led engagement throughout the customer journey
Identify customers who are at risk of attrition or churn, as well as identify potential expansion opportunities (i.e., license and/or subscription tier)

Use Cases

Note: The use cases, approaches, and metrics below include current and planned use cases. The following are some examples of how GitLab may use operational data. Use cases may also be dependent on customer settings or consents the customer has provided to GitLab.

Identifying Expansion Opportunities

Triggered CTA (call to action) and associated playbook for a CSM when a customer begins to adopt a new use case such as scanning. Often the central DevOps teams are not up to speed on how all of their users are using the platform. These these playbooks will guide the CSM in exploring the expansion with the customer and optimizing for this additional use case across the customer's broader user base.

Identifying Enablement Opportunities

Each customer's use case adoption will be measured against a maturity matrix/score, enabling customized enablement roadmaps per use case per customer based on areas of potential improvement

Identifying & Mitigating Risk

Triggered alerts in Gainsight to notify a CSM to take action when there are concerning patterns within the month over month operational data.
Reporting and alerts when adoption across a use case goes from 'Green' to 'Yellow' or 'Red', indicating potential movement from a team off of the platform

Lifecycle Management

Lifecycle Management Approach Leverages Operational Data Link to pdf for improved viewing

Success Planning and Outcome Delivery

When a CSM is engaged, the usage data will be a key measure for the customer success plan to ensure the customer is successfully adopting the use cases and features to deliver to their goals and objectives. Data and metrics will be leveraged and shared throughout the engagement and in customer Executive Business Reviews.
In a digital-only engagement, the usage data will serve as a measure to ensure the customer adopts the desired customer use cases. The digital journey will be developed to serve key content to help customers adopt these use cases and progress through their customer journey.

Onboarding

A measure of successful onboarding includes the activation and active use of licenses and potentially use case adoption.

Adoption and Expansion

In alignment with a customer's goals, the adoption of the customer's desired use cases will be monitored and used to drive engagement activities based on operational data. Depending on the adoption progress, resulting actions could be:
- CSM may provide enablement content (product documentation, educational videos, etc.), guidance on best practices and approaches, key capabilities to adopt, and/or services to ensure successful adoption.
- CSM engages with customers to understand if there are any issues or blockers with the customer (for example, training or enablement gaps, change management delays, technical issues, configuration problems, etc.). Depending on the issue, support and/or product may be engaged to assist the customer.
- In a digital-only engagement, relevant content could be delivered to the customer (for example, best practices, configuration guides, education/enablement videos) based on the customer's usage data.
- When mature adoption of desired use case(s) is complete, we may recommend additional use cases or capabilities that would provide added value to the customer.
The customer's services usage may indicate there are capabilities in a higher subscription tier that may provide additional value to the customer. This would be proposed by the CSM, sales representative, or digitally.

Process and Playbooks

The quality of key engagement processes and playbooks like onboarding, adoption, and expansion will be measured by usage stats to determine if changes drive desired improvements with customer adoption. Some objects may include:
- Accelerating time-to-value and time to mature adoption of use cases
- Improving speed or sequence of adopting features and capabilities
- Improving customer experience and satisfaction
- Improving the success rates at expanding into new use cases

Product

Measure usage of features, stages, and use cases for Product Team key performance indicators (KPIs)
Understand usage of the product to identify and/or validate product investments to improve the product and customer experience
Identify customers who are using certain GitLab stages or use cases for feedback (through surveys, interviews, etc.)

Marketing

Identify and market to community users who could get additional value from paid subscription tiers
Utilize usage stats from customers to provide contextually relevant content and lifecycle marketing campaigns

Metrics

Time-to-First Value uses license data and potentially use case stats in the future
License Utilization: Assist the customer in determining how well utilized licenses are, how they could be used, and assess their future needs
xMAU leverages usage stats and is a key performance indicator (KPI) for the Product Team
Use case expansion playbook success will be measured by customer use case adoption
Use case health score will leverage use case adoption (scored as minimum to advanced). This is used to understand which use cases have been adopted and what is the progress on adopting those use cases.
Customer health scores (planned) will leverage use case health scores. This is used to analyze and understand the customer's overall health through engagement and depth of deployment. This will also leverage other inputs like support cases and NPS/customer sentiment surveys.

Data Privacy

The collection and use of operational data will governed in accordance with the GitLab Privacy Policy.

Relevant Links

Customer Success Vision Page
Operational Data in Gainsight: Gainsight is a customer lifecycle management platform used for CSM and digital engagement
Customer Use Case Adoption: includes definitions on how each product usage health score is calculated
License Utilization in Gainsight: includes definitions and calculation methodology for License Utilization
Customer Use Cases and Stage Mapping (internal document)
Product Usage in Gainsight FAQ Guide
Metrics Dictionary
Analytics Instrumentation Overview (details on operational data)
Email Marketing Data Mart

Product Usage Reporting Vision