Growth:Expansion Group

Maintained by:

Vision

The Expansion Group is part of the Growth Sub-department and works with our product counterparts on Growth priorities. The engineering effort consists of developing and running growth experiments on GitLab.com, adding and enhancing features, and improving the quality of our code across multiple GitLab projects. We track the delivery of both Deliverables and Growth-Deliverables.

See What's next

I have a question. Who do I ask?

Questions should start by @ mentioning the Product Manager for the Expansion group or creating a new issue in the Growth Product Expansion issues list.

Mission

The Growth:Expansion Group works on product priorities and growth deliverables with our Growth product managers and contributes to Growth initiatives including the Registration Flow and Continuous onboarding.

Team Members

The following people are permanent members of the Growth:Expansion team:

Person	Role
Phil Calder	Interim Senior Engineering Manager, Growth
Doug Stull	Senior Fullstack Engineer, Growth:Expansion
Jackie Fraser	Fullstack Engineer, Growth:Expansion

Group members

We work directly with the following team members in the Growth:Expansion group:

Person	Role
Gayle Doud	Senior Product Manager, Growth:Expansion
Matej Latin	Senior Product Designer, Growth:Expansion and Adoption
Andrew Kelly	Senior Security Engineer, Application Security, Growth (Activation, Conversion, Expansion, Adoption), Fulfillment (Purchase, License, Utilization), Enablement (Distribution, Geo, Memory, Global Search, Database)

Functional Counterparts

We collaborate with our colleagues in the Growth Sub-department teams:

As well as the wider Growth Sub-department stable counterparts.

UX

The Growth UX team has a handbook page which includes Growth specific workflows.

How we work

We're data savvy
In accordance with our GitLab values
Transparently: nearly everything is public
We get a chance to work on the things we want to work on
Everyone can contribute; no silos

Prioritization

Prioritization is a collaboration between Product, UX, Data, and Engineering.

We use the ICE framework for experiments.
We use Priority and Severity labels for bugs.

Workflow

We use the Product Development workflow when working on issues and merge requests across multiple projects.

While not all of the work we do relates to the GitLab project directly, we use milestones for planning and to track Deliverables, Growth-Deliverables and other enhancements.

Overview

Board	Description
Planning	This board shows Expansion team work that has been allocated to a particular milestone.
Deliverables	A subset of the milestone board shows issues the Product Manager has determined to be `Deliverables`.

Working boards

The validation track is where the Product Manager - usually in collaboration with UX - defines what the team should aim to deliver. Once complete, the Product Manager will move to workflow::planning breakdown (larger issues) or straight to workflow::scheduling for Engineering to pick up. If there is no Engineering input required the issue can be closed.
The Retention Engineering group (group::retention) schedules issues for development in the build phase, based on the Product Managers priorities. For bugs and security issues, Priority and Severity labels will have been added by the Product Manager.
Combined workflow board shows the combined workflow including validation and build tracks.

Board	GitLab.org	GitLabServices
Validation (PM/UX)	All	All
Build (Eng)	All	All
Combined	All	All

The above boards can be filtered by milestone to provide additional context around priority. For example a priority::3 security issue (due within 90 days) will be added to one of the next 3 milestones by the Engineering team during the workflow::scheduling stage to ensure that SLA is met.