Product Marketing

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4. Portfolio Marketing
5. Product Marketing

Maintained by:

William Chia

@williamchia

On this page

• Product marketing at GitLab
  • Onboarding
  • Intersection
  • Who we collaborate with:
  • Metrics and Measures
  • Use cases
  • Stages and categories
  • Post-Sprint activities
  • Organization Model
  • Key links
    • PMM Talk Inventory
  • Release posts
    • Release vs. launch
    • Task cascading after release
  • PMM Team Structure

Product marketing at GitLab

Product Marketing communicates GitLab business value internally and externally to position GitLab as a DevOps partner and solution. The team is responsible for product positioning, value messaging, and go-to-market strategy to support sales and outbound messaging with analysts, press, and prospects. Product Marketing also facilitates market feedback as key inputs into the GitLab product roadmap.

Specifically, product marketing develops and delivers messaging, positioning, and compelling collateral/content such as:

1. Web pages / digital content
2. Presentations for analysts, events, and sales
3. Research that supports eBooks, white papers, blogs, and infographics
4. Briefings for analysts and press
5. Enablement for sales and partners

Onboarding

• Go to the PMM onboarding page and check out our onboarding guide.

Intersection

Product marketing operates at the intersection of the Market demands based on a) understanding the enterprise development team challenges and specific their challenges / use cases, and b) Understanding the product categories, features, and capabilities and how they deliver value in specific use cases.

Who we collaborate with:

In general, product marketing supports three main groups:

1. Enables sales with positioning, messaging, content, and collateral.
   1. Create decks, messaging, and collateral
   2. Support and deliver sales enablement
2. Supports campaigns, content, and field marketing teams with content, webinars, presentations, and strategic input.
   1. Drafts content, whitepapers, webinars, and presentations
3. Partners with the Product teams on vision, roadmaps, and new features to improve our differentiation.
   1. Feedback and input into vision and roadmap
   2. Drafting the Release Post Headline and Introduction
   3. Reviewing and updating feature descriptions

Metrics and Measures

1. Deliverables (events, content, page updates, etc) over time.
2. Utilization / Reach (TBD - impact of the deliverables/events we support).

Use cases

Customer 'use cases' are a customer problem or initiative that needs a solution and attracts budget, typically defined In customer terms. In Product Marketing, we build content and messaging that engages prospects who are looking for solutions to specific challenges they face. In product marketing, we:

1. Research and prioritize customer 'use cases'.
2. Lead analyst reports and contribute to analyst research.
3. Define the 'buyer's journey' for a specific use case.
4. Audit our existing content and collateral for each stage of the buyer's journey.
5. Prioritize and refine existing or create new content.
6. Collaborate with the rest of the marketing groups (Marketing Program Management, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, SDRs, etc.) to promote and measure GTM effectiveness.

Adding Competitive Content to Use Cases

A core element to use cases is effective objection handling against major competitors in the narket. In order to effectively support this effort, a partnership between Product Marketing and Product Management to maintain adding competitior walkthroughs and competitive content to the existing use cases is critical. To date we have competitive sections on the following uses cases:

1. SCM
2. CI
3. DevSecOps
4. GitOps

In FY22-Q2, we are taking on an effort to continually update these Tier 1 and Tier 2 use cases and are assigning DRIs, follow along this effort in gitlab&1446

Stages and categories

DevOps stages and categories organize and define how we plan and engineer new GitLab features.

1. Contribute to the stage and category vision.
2. Lead messaging for release posts and support feature descriptions.
3. Competitive research and comparisons.

Health Status Definitions for Product Marketing:

• On Track: We are confident this issue will be completed by the end of the current Sprint.
• Needs Attention: There are concerns, new complexity, or unanswered questions that if left unattended will result in the issue missing its targeted completion date. Collaboration needed to get back On Track.
• At Risk: The issue in its current state will not make the targeted completion date and immediate action is needed to rectify the situation.

Flagging Risk is not a Negative

We feel it is important to document and communicate that changing of any item's Health Status to "Needs Attention" or "At Risk" is not a negative action and should not cause anxiety or concern. Raising risk early helps the team to respond and resolve problems faster and should be encouraged.

Post-Sprint activities

At the end of a Sprint, any unfinished items will be rolled over into the next Sprint, unless circumstances have altered that item's priority (for example, if the feature is no longer needed or a new company priority supersedes all others).

Twice per month, the PMM team will designate a portion of one of their weekly team meetings to a Sprint Retrospective, where they will review what went well, what could be improved, and what they will commit to change in upcoming sprints.

Organization Model

Customer use cases are our primary focus, as we strive to communicate the value of GitLab and how it helps customers address specific challenges they are facing. All of the GitLab stages and categories support various use cases in different degrees. By focusing on Use Cases, we intend to remain connected to the market and our customers while educating them about how GitLab can solve their specific challenges.

In this model, Senior PMMs are responsible for both the collateral and messaging supporting a specific Use Case and also one or several stages. Detail stable counterparts assignments between product marketing and specific product groups is maintained in the Product Categories page. PMMs support the team with messaging and go to market efforts, leading research, writing, and collateral development.

This model helps to define several stable counterpart relationships with the product and engineering teams, where specific use cases map to current sections in our hierarchy.

Key links

• Messaging
• GitLab positioning
• Hidden IT Groups
• Defining GitLab roles and personas
• GitLab tiers
• Market segmentation - Industry verticals
• Use Case - Go to market

PMM Talk Inventory

Release posts

Release vs. launch

A product release, and a marketing launch are two separate activities. The canonical example of this is Apple. They launch the iPhone at their yearly event and then release it months later. At GitLab we do it the other way: Release features as soon as they are ready letting customers use them right away, and then, do a marketing launch later when we have market validation.

Task cascading after release

Since at GitLab we release a lot, alot at GitLab we ought to strive to communicate and promote whatever makes a difference to our community, our clients and the market at large. Regardless of what constitutes a launch – a consensus reached internally at the group level based on different reasons – progressive delivery a la GitLab requires that only categories or features that reach the maturity level of viable require the following marketing activity cascading:

PMM Team Structure

Who should I contact?

Listed below are areas of responsibility within the product marketing team: