Are you not on the product team, but looking for information on how to get in contact with or provide information/ask questions to product managers? Please see our How to Engage guide.
The document below talks about how we do product at GitLab, not about what. For the what, see Product Direction.
If you are a product manager looking to learn our process, this document is broken into the following sections:
Consistently create products and experiences that customers love and value.
Additional color:
These are core principles we believe strongly in. The goal is to build a PM system that fosters and honors these principles, in a way that works for GitLab.
GitLab is designed and developed in a unique way.
Consistent with our value of Efficiency the product is developed with directly responsible individuals from Product and Engineering working together.
| Product Managers | Engineering Managers |
|---|---|
| Set priorities and define what Engineering works on | Own the definition of done; decide what gets merged into Product |
As a result of the two interactions above, community contributions are not necessarily subjected to the processes described below. So long as an MR matches the definition of done as defined by Engineering, changes may make their way into Product.
The direction for the GitLab product is spelled out on the Direction page. This document provides lessons and heuristics on how to design changes and new features. Our iterative process is demonstrated in a blog post.
Much of our product philosophies are inspired by the Ruby on Rails doctrine of 'Rails is omakase'. I highly suggest reading these.
From development teams to marketing organizations, everyone needs to collaborate on digital content. Content should be open to suggestions by a wide number of potential contributors. Open contribution can be achieved by using a mergeable file format and distributed version control. The mission of GitLab is to allow everyone to collaborate on all digital content so people can cooperate effectively and achieve better results, faster.
Ideas flow though many stages before they are realized. An idea originates in a chat discussion, an issue is created, it is planned in a sprint, coded in an IDE, committed to version control, tested by CI, code reviewed, deployed, monitored, and documented. Stitching all these stages of the DevOps lifecycle together can be done in many different ways. You can have a marketplace of proprietary apps from different suppliers or use a suite of products developed in isolation.
Reduce every change proposal to its absolutely minimally viable form. This allows us to ship almost anything within a single release, get immediate feedback and avoid deep investments in ideas that might not work. Other advantages:
The minimally viable change should not be a broken feature.
We only ship in a Minimally Viable Product style. Here are some guidelines about it:
The MVP should be achievable in one iteration.
Virtually every new feature must be maintained forever (the standard for sunsetting a feature is very high). Creating a new feature means that GitLab has to continually manage the technical costs of maintenance of that feature. Making small changes with quick feedback loops reduces the risk of introducing a new feature where the value doesn't justify the long-term costs.
A new feature also adds a tax on the user experience due to additional complexity in the product. Make sure that the benefits gained by users from the new feature more than cover the tax incurred, accounting for how frequently the new feature is used by users. In particular, the new feature should satisfy this inequality:
(benefits * frequency) / (tax * (1-frequency)) > 1
Despite its minimal form, the change
There is a certain failure case for MVC issues that product managers need to be aware of and actively work to prevent; because we don't have infinite capacity to work on everything, and good ideas are always coming in, it's possible (if the PM is not watching closely) for issues with good ideas to slowly but inevitably decay into something that is difficult to understand and move forward with. As more and more comments are added and the issue slowly morphs from idea to idea without any direction from a product manager, it will become difficult to ever make complete sense of it again without losing some important context. It will also be nearly impossible for someone who wants to make a community contribution to understand what the direction is. It becomes an undefined blob of ideas.
To prevent this, it is the responsibility of the product manager to quickly turn open-ended idea issues into something actionable, deliverable, and truly MVC as quickly as possible.
The guidance for product managers here is to never let an idea issue persist longer than three months without having been converted into a clear MVC. If this has not happened, you should ask yourself why this is the case: is the idea overly broad? Is there no clear immediate deliverable? Is it just not important enough to spend time on? These are all signals that should be acted upon without delay, before the issue degrades to the point that it becomes unusable without significant rework.
In practice, if the original issue was really broad, and still contains great ideas, then simply converting it into an MVC that gets closed when it ships could be a disservice as valuable context is lost when it comes time to improve upon the MVC. In this case, consider creating a new issue for the MVC so that it is crisp and concise, and leave the original issue as a post-MVC meta item.
We try to prevent maintaining functionality that is language or platform specific because they slow down our ability to get results. Examples of how we handle it instead are:
Outside our scope are Kubernetes and everything it depends on:
During a presentation of Kubernetes Brendan Burns talks about the 4 Ops layers at the 2:00 mark:
GitLab helps you mainly with application ops. And where needed we also allow you to monitor clusters and link them to application environments. But we intend to use vanilla Kubernetes instead of something specific to GitLab.
Also outside our scope are products that are not specific to developing, securing, or operating applications and digital products.
In scope are things that are not mainly for SaaS applications:
Just because something is not invented here doesn't mean it doesn't have a perfect home within our solution. GitLab is an Open Core product and is part of the broader ecosystem of Open Source tools in the market. Every day there are new innovative tools out there that solve real-world customer problems; we should not be afraid of embedding these tools into our own products in order to solve those same problems for our customers too. Leveraging existing technology allows us to get to market much more quickly, to contribute to Open Source (and help strengthen Open Source as a whole), and allows us to focus our own people on making GitLab itself better. Building professional relationships with these tool creators also is a positive for GitLab since they may have important user perspectives around your categories.
We have achieved many successes following this approach:
There are also many more examples throughout the company where this has been successful. As a product manager you should be monitoring the world of Open Source as it relates to your area to see where new innovative tools are being developed, and not be afraid of integrating those. One thing to keep in mind, integrating could be anything from a blog post describing how the tool works together with GitLab all the way up to bundling it inside of our own installation, and this can evolve iteratively.
We admire other convention over configuration tools like Ruby on Rails (that doctrine of which perfectly describes the value of integrated systems), Ember, and Heroku, and strive to offer the same advantages for a continuous delivery of software.
Furthermore, Ruby on Rails has been of massive influence to the Ruby community. Uplifting it, and making it more powerful and useful than ever before, for many more usecases. We want GitLab to be to Kubernetes, what Rails is to Ruby.
You should prefer choices that are well thought out and based on current best practices. Avoid unnecessary configuration. Avoid configuration to support fragile workflows.
For example, when considering whether to add a checkbox or two radio boxes, think carefully about what users really want. Most of the time, you'll find you really only need one solution, so remove the other option. When two possible choices really are necessary, the best or most common one should be the default, and the other one should be available. If the non-default choices are significantly less common, then consider taking them out of the main workflow for making decisions, by putting them behind an Advanced configuration tab, for example.
Every configuration option in GitLab multiplies its complexity, which means the application is harder to use, harder to develop, and less friendly to users.
Requests for configuration can be a proxy for trying to support a fragile workflow. Rather than enabling bad habits and incurring product debt, effort should be spent helping customers adopt best practices.
Making features configurable is easy and lazy. It's a natural reaction to propose a big change to be configurable, as you worry it'll negatively affect certain users. However, by making a feature configurable, you've now created two problems.
Removing a configuration after it shipped and in use is much more work than not introducing it in the first place. This is because you change the behavior for customers that selected the less popular option. Adding a configuration is a one way door that should be avoided if possible. And for sure should be left out of the first iteration of a feature if at all possible. You can add it easily but removing it is hard.
Work on solutions that work for everyone, and that replace all previous solutions.
Sometimes configuration is inevitable or preferable. GitLab should work perfectly right out of the box for most users. Your configuration must not make that experience worse and should always get out of the way of the user.
Convention also implies that we're encouraging our customers to do things in a certain way. A very concrete example of this is the ability to disable pipelines. We believe that our integrated solution will give a superior user experience and we're motivated to encourage this behavior. For this reason, adding a configuration to allow disabling this permanently (be that in a template or instance-wide), is something that should be avoided.
Encourage favorable behaviors by limiting configuration.
In addition to encouraging behavior by limiting the ability to toggle features, new features, when introduced, should default to turning things ON (if they are configurable at all), and when necessary, automatically migrate existing users/groups/projects to have the new features ON.
Avoiding configurations is not always possible. When we have no choice, the secondary priority is to configure something in the GitLab interface. A configuration should only appear in a file (gitlab.rb or gitlab.yml) as a last resort.
Within each stage, the learning curve must be at least comparable to our best-in-class competitors, with clear, cohesive workflows, a highly usable interface, and comprehensive documentation. Our product must have an easy UX that accommodates all users.
There are two major configuration files available in GitLab. Adding configurations to either should be avoided as much as possible.
gitlab.yml is the configuration file used by the Rails application. This is where the domain is configured. Other configurations should be moved to the UI as much as possible and no new configurations should be added here.gitlab.rb is the configuration file for Omnibus-GitLab. It acts not only as an abstraction of the configuration of gitlab.yml for GitLab-Rails, but also as the source for all configurations for services included and managed within the Omnibus-GitLab. Newly introduced services probably need to be configured here.When you have to add a new configuration, make sure that the features and services are on by default. Only add a configuration line to either of these configuration files if the feature or service cannot be fully disabled from the admin UI.
Convention over configuration is also listed in the CONTRIBUTING file in GitLab's repositories.
Many crazy, over-ambitious ideas sound like they are impossible just because no one else is doing them.
Since we have amazing engineers and a culture of shipping minimally viable changes, we are able to do a lot more 'impossible' things than others.
That's why we're shipping merge conflict resolution, why we shipped built-in CI before anyone else, why we built a better static pages solution, and why we're able to compete.
Here at GitLab, we are an ambitious company and this means we aim for big things with every release. The reality of taking chances and planning aspirationally means that we won't always be able to deliver everything that we wanted to try in every release, and similar to our OKRs, we believe this is a good thing. We don't want to shy away from challenging ourselves and always want to keep a sense of urgency, and aiming for more helps us do that. Also see the importance of velocity
Doing something simple in GitLab should BE simple and require no human cpu-cycles to do so. Things that are simple now should still be simple two years from now, ten years from now, and onwards.
This sounds obvious, but messing with flow is easily done. In most cases, flow is disrupted by adding another action, or another click.
For instance: You want users to be made aware of the rules of a project. Your proposal is a little popup that shows the rules before they create an issue. This means that every time that someone creates an issue they need to click once before resuming their normal action. This is unacceptable. A better solution is to add a link to the issue that points the user to this.
It's very hard to maintain flow with a lot of configurations and options. In cases where you want to enforce a certain behaviour, the most obvious step may be to add another step or action. This can be avoided by making the action work in parallel (like a link in the issue), encouraging rather than enforcing certain behaviours.
Also, we don't want users to be able to construct workflows that break GitLab or make it work in unpredictable ways.
Feature discoverability is important for allowing new and existing users to access old and new features, thereby increasing the value for them. It also allows GitLab to get as much feedback as possible, as fast as possible, in order to quickly iterate.
However, UI that purports to increase discoverability, but that is not carefully designed and implemented, may actually harm the overall experience by constantly shoving unwanted images and text in the face of the user. The end result is that the user loses trust in GitLab, and they no longer take the time to carefully parse text and other UI elements in the future. Even worse, they might leave GitLab because of this degraded experience. The following are a few illustrative examples and best practices.
Think of this: Your co-worker is hard at work in front of their computer, and you suddenly tap their shoulder or yell at them to tell them about some new cool widget. You better have a good reason for that: that widget better be awesome.
Back to the analogy: Your co-worker said they don't care about that new cool widget. Never, ever, ever, bring it up again. They told you they don't care, and you need to respect that.
Leveraging navigation is an effective design paradigm to introduce a user to a new feature or area of GitLab.
If at the current moment they don't want to be disturbed, they can just ignore it because it is only a slight visual disturbance (as compared to a banner which takes up more screen real estate).
If dismissed once, it stays dismissed forever, for that user, across all clients that the user can access GitLab with.
Back to the analogy. We're not going to bother our co-worker with 5 different cool new widgets at the same time.
Shipping only MVCs can result in a large set of loosely connected pieces that don't necessarily combine into a single, great user experience.
An obvious solution to this would be to plan out the future in detail, creating a long-term detailed plan. However, this is unwanted as it can restrict your flexibility and ability to respond to changing needs or feedback.
Flow One offers an alternative. You draw out a workflow consisting of MVCs (that can be shipped individually). The workflow should only cover a specific, narrow use-case, and nothing more.
This means you:
Flow One should cover the first iteration of a particular workflow. After this, individual MVCs can be introduced to expand the use-cases or loosen the assumptions (e.g. from a feature that can only be used if you're using feature branches, to one that works for other git strategies).
See our thoughts on breadth over depth on our strategy page. While we prioritize breadth over depth, Product Managers should not lose sight of maturing each product category, with the ultimate goal of each category moving into a lovable state. A good rule of thumb to consider when planning product improvements, is that over time, approximately 70% of engineering effort should be allocated on breadth, and 30% on depth.
Using data to learn from our users is important. Our users are spread across GitLab.com and self-managed instances, so we have to focus our efforts on learning and providing benefit to both when we decide to collect more data, or build and use additional analytics tools. If we do this, we can help make the rest of the company successful as well. This means that we should:
Per GitLab Stewardship, we will not introduce artificial limits in Core. Artificial means arbitrarily setting a small number (such as: 1) as a limit on a given GitLab object category, that would incur no additional effort or cost had we chosen a larger number. The additional effort includes product, design, and engineering effort to create the feature in the first place, and to maintain it over time.
For example, GitLab Core has the issue board feature in every project. In GitLab EE, each project supports multiple boards. This does not mean that Core has an artificial limit of one board per project, because there is additional effort to manage multiple boards such as supporting the navigation interface, and all the associated engineering work.
We're discussing enforced workflows in this issue.
Enforced workflows should be avoided in GitLab. For example, there are three issue states (Open, In Progress (as of 10.2), and Closed), and any issue should be allowed to transition from one state to any other state without workflow restrictions. (Roles and permissions is a separate concern.)
A comment on Hacker News perfectly details what can go wrong when enforcing workflows:
"The down side for the true end-users, those who actually use the software day-to-day, is that most business processes are awful. If your experience is the hellish existence that I see strolled about on threads where JIRA comes up …:
But that comment also specifies the advantage:
"JIRA's most powerful feature is that it affords for mapping businesses processes onto software. This is incredibly compelling to enterprise customers. Software that enforces workflows, procedures and requirements can be an incredible lever and JIRA's price point makes build vs buy decisions an absolute no-brainer."
We should ensure that GitLab makes it easy to help with enterprise workflows:
Small primitives are building blocks in GitLab. They are an abstraction not at the technical level, but truly at the product level. Small primitives can be combined, built-upon further, and otherwise leveraged to create new functionality in GitLab. For example, the label lists in issue boards use the smaller primitive of labels.
They are especially powerful because they usually take less effort and provide higher leverage than you would get from a more "complete" but standalone feature. Think of how simple Unix command line utilities can be chained together to do really complicated things, much easier (and certainly more flexibly) than you could have done with a dedicated tool.
When iterating on GitLab, strongly consider using small primitives instead of creating new abstractions, especially when considering MVC features that will provide the foundations for further improvements. To do this you can start with easy to apply concepts that meet the needs of intermediate to advanced users; from here document the usage clearly and be sure to think about discoverability. The UX can very often be refactored or enhanced later when there's a demonstrated need for refinement, onboarding for less sophisticated users, or other new abstractions needed that were identified through real-world usage.
While our big, hairy, audacious goal spans all development processes, personas and use-cases, there are primary targets in each one of these venues. When considering prioritization we should first aim to provide complete maturity for developers building cloud native applications in a modern way prior to moving to other development methodologies, personas and application types.
When developing features to compete with existing competitors, make sure to solve problems for modern development teams first, and then see what's missing for legacy teams. e.g. For project management, make great project management capabilities for teams doing conversational development, lean, or even agile development before doing Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) or waterfall.
Our strategy includes going after a lot of new personas, going from developers to operations, security, product managers, designers, etc. But when developing features in these new areas, it's important to remember to start with the developer. If we can make security great for developers and then great for security professionals, we'll be much more successful.
Development teams deploy to tons of different platforms, from bare metal to cloud VMs to cloud-native Kubernetes clusters. We build features for cloud-native first, and then support the rest. This allows us to focus on where development is going, and deliver solutions that every company aspires to use eventually, even if they're not ready to today.
Introducing changes requires a number of steps, with some overlap, that should be completed in order:
We believe that good product development starts with a well understood and tightly articulated customer problem. Once we have a clear and shared understanding of the customer problem, then generating solutions, developing the product experience, and launching to the market becomes much more effective. The danger in not starting with the problem is that you might miss out on solutions that come from deeply understanding the customer problem. A poorly defined problem statement can also cause the design and development phases to be inefficient.
Velocity and iteration are both key competitive attributes of GitLab Inc, but done in isolation are not the most effective or efficient route to customer results.
We expect Product Managers and Product Designers to partner on a product validation phase when one or more of the following criteria are met:
Complete to LovableThe following dates are derived from the Product Development Timeline.
direction label. i.e. all items mentioned at the Kickoff should have the direction label, and all direction items that are marked as Deliverable for the upcoming release should be mentioned. Issues such as documentation or minor fixes need not be mentioned. Same applies to exploration issues.(previous release = published last month, current release = published this month, upcoming release = published next month)
Aligned with the company cadence, Product planning follows:
Inspired by:
The product plan is an important part of each PMs work. PMs are expected to maintain the accuracy of their plan throughout the year through stakeholder conversations and other research.
Around November we set the new plan for the coming year, which ties closely into the overall strategy. During this period we create a new "Product Plan 20XX" label and apply it to issues that have been identified as contributing to the plan that year.
PMs are able to refine their plans and strategy throughout the year, but since the these are important to be aware of, major updates to the content that happen ad-hoc should also be communicated widely - for example, using the Product FGC meetings or other communication channels.
It's important to note here that your plan is not simply a list of new features and innovation. Those are included for sure, but so are issues related to all of your sensing mechanisms. A category upgrade from minimal to viable or delivery of a top customer issue (for example) can contribute to your plan just as much as a brilliant new innovative feature can. It's up to PMs to balance this through a coherent longer-term strategy.
Conversely, in a broad sense anything could move the plan forward in a general way. Product Plan items (i.e., with the label) should be direction-level items that move the strategy forward meaningfully. This is up to the PM to set the bar for, but there should be a clear step forward with real user value.
Finally, issues are the substance of your plan. Epics can receive the label as well, to keep things organized, but we track the delivery of our plan on a per-issue basis. Ensure you are applying the label appropriately.
In each release, you should be moving your plan forward. At least one item with this label should be included; if not, it's possible you're getting off track from where you planned to go and should assess.
Note that, by their nature, Product Plan items should not be sitting in the backlog or with no milestone. If they are this is a signal that either they are not as important as originally thought, or that something important is not getting due attention.
merged or not merged on the rightmost column. If any direction items were added (new items or newly marked as ~direction) add those to the document and mark them in bold.not merged should be included again in the next releaseAfter the feature freeze, it's expected of each product manager to test their own features and perform quality assurance to the best of their ability and follow up where necessary.
Product managers can use the staging environment once the release managers have deployed a release candidate to staging. Release managers should post in the #product channel in Slack that a new release candidate is available. Product managers can also use other environments as needed, such as GitLab provisioned on Kubernetes with GKE.
Before a new features is shipped, the PM should test it out to make sure it solves the original problem effectively. This is not about quality assurance (QA), as developers are responsible for the quality of their code. This is about feature assurance (FA). Feature assurance is necessary because sometimes there are misunderstandings between the original issue proposal and the final implementation. Sometimes features don't actually solve the intended problem, even though it seemed like it would, and sometimes solutions just don't feel as useful as intended when actually implemented.
If you can test out the feature during development, pulling down branches locally (or with a review app!), that's great. But sometimes it's not feasible to test a feature until it's bundled into a release candidate and deployed to GitLab.com. If so, make sure to test out features as soon as possible so any new issues can be addressed before final release. Also, take the FA cycle into account when scheduling new milestone work.
If you are looking to test code that has not been merged to GitLab.com or is not yet part of an RC, you can pull the branch down locally and test it using the GitLab Development Kit (GDK).
Product managers should set Milestones for issues marked with the security label to guarantee they are shipped by their due date, as defined in the Security Team process. Product Managers are the DRIs for prioritization. As such they should deeply understand the implications and risks of security related issues and balance those when prioritizing. You may need to set a different milestone for security issues, for example because of low capacity, but before doing that you should engage a conversation with the Security Team. Priority labels and Due Date designations should not be modified by product managers in any case, since they are directly managed by the Security Team, and used to track metrics and progress.
There are certain features of the product that don't fit squarely into a particular stage. Instead, the relevant functionality within the feature will inform where the work should be assigned. For example "Chat" is not owned by any particular stage, so functionality should be considered when labeling such work, for example:
Plan since this stage is responsible for enabling users to collaborate with team members.Create since this stage is responsible for code management and merge requests.Finally, any work that is deemed necessary or urgently needed for a particular group to move forward (for example, to unblock another planned feature) should be owned by that group if a more fitting group is unable to complete in a reasonable timeframe. This model allows teams to be flexible and calibrate their priorities accordingly, and a team should thus never be blocked. (An exception would be if a change required anything that a software engineer would not be allowed to do, such as a production change, in which case the infrastructure team would be the blocker.)
Stages, groups, and categories serve as a common framework for organizing and communicating the scope of GitLab.
Documentation on how to make changes to stages, groups, and categories, as well as what approvals are required, can be found in our website handbook page.
After a change has been approved, we may need to globally optimize during the initial transition period, and ensure that important issues are not blocked.
There are three common scenarios which may encounter these transition periods:
In each of these scenarios, a Group may become temporarily responsible for a future Group's issues and backlog. During this time, the responsible Group should balance the needs of our users and organization, prioritizing across the common backlog.
As the group(s) working on a Stage grow in size, a new Group may need to be formed so group sizes remain manageable. For example, today there is a single group for Manage, but will be splitting into control and framework groups.
To prepare for splitting a Stage into multiple Groups, we should:
categories.yml and stages.yml, assigning each Group a set of Categoriesdevops::manageControl or Frameworkdevops::manage backlogOnce the first PM or EM is hired, the new Group should be formed:
Control and Framework. Ideally, each group would have at least two backend engineers, but that is not always possible.stages.yml and team.yml to reflect the current group members.g_control and g_framework, and close the previous Slack channel (e.g. g_manage)As the rest of the EM/PM's are hired, they take over that role for the respective group.
The categories within a Stage will change over time, based on GitLab's direction and the market landscape. The groups within a Stage will need to be able to handle these changes, without issues falling in the cracks.
When the categories change, we should:
categories.yml and stages.yml, ensure all categories are assigned to a GroupWhen GitLab decides to address additional needs within the single application, a new Stage may need to be created. For example, Defend may be created to address additional needs beyond what Secure focuses on.
When a new Stage is added, and its Group has yet to be formed, we should:
devops::defend and DefendSecure, which will be initially responsible for the new Stagedevops::defend and devops::securecategories.yml and stages.yml, listing the new Stage with the members of the existing responsible GroupOnce the first PM or EM is hired, a new Group for the Stage should be formed:
Defend. Each Group should have at least two backend engineers.Secure on Secure and Defend on Defend.stages.yml to reflect the new Group and its members.As the rest of the EM/PM's are hired, they take over that role for the new Group.
Throughout the customer lifecycle, customer facing teams (Support, Sales, Professional Services, Account Managers, etc.) may need the assistance of a product manager. This can include a detailed discussion of our direction, how to address specific use cases, or gaps in functionality, with an organization.
To ensure these requests can be quickly triaged, easily scheduled, and later tracked, there is a standardized request process based on issues.
Product support requests are tracked in the Product team project. To create a request:
Product-Support-Request templateFor time sensitive and high impact requests, please paste a link to the issue in the #product Slack channel, and @mention the recommended PM's in the template.
When a support request is opened, labels will automatically be assigned to categorize the request.
Three fields are particularly important when triaging requests:
urgent requests should be treated with a high priority.All product managers should ensure they are set up to receive label notifications for their respective stages:
If you follow the principles and workflow above, you won't be writing long, detailed specs for a part of the product for next year. So how should you be spending your time?
Invest the majority of your time (say 70%) in deeply understanding the problem. Then spend 10% of your time writing the spec for the first iteration only and handling comments, and use the remaining 20% to work on promoting it.
A problem you understand well should always have a (seemingly) simple or obvious solution. Reduce it to its simplest form (see above) and only ship that.
Once you've shipped your solution, both you and the community will have a much better idea of what can be improved and what should be prioritized for future iterations.
As a PM, you're the person that has to kick-off new initiatives. You're not responsible for shipping something on time, but you are responsible for taking action and setting the direction. Be active everywhere, over-communicate, and sell the things you think are important to the rest of the team and community.
As a PM, you need to set the bar for engineering. That is, to push engineering and the rest of the company. You almost want engineering to complain about the pace that product is setting. Our default instinct will be to slow down, but we can't give in to that.
As a PM you don't own the product; ask other people for feedback and give team members and the community the space to suggest and create things without your direct intervention. It's your job to make sure things are decided and planned, not come up with every idea or change.
#product Slack channel.#questions.#git-help.#peopleops.The responsibilities for Product Managers, Director of Product, VP of Product and VP of Product Strategy are outlined in our job families pages.
The progression of responsibilitie allocation between tactical, operational and strategic is well illustrated by this helpful chart.
Thanks to Melissa Perri for the image
In addition, as a Product Manager you're expected to:
Occasionally, Product Managers are asked to perform the role of "Life Support" Product Manager for a group. When doing so please refer to the Life Support PM expectations.
As we grow, Product Managers can be listed across multiple stages and be asked to perform the role of Product Manager across split or multiple teams in an "Interim" basis. While temporary and based on future hiring, these positions are not considered "Life Support" and thus the standard Responsibilities and Expectations apply.
The product team is responsible for iteration on most of GitLab's products and projects:
This includes the entire stack and all its facets. The product team needs to weigh and prioritize not only bugs, features, regressions, performance, but also architectural changes and other changes required for ensuring GitLab's excellence.
Everyone at GitLab is involved with the product. It's the reason why we are working together.
With every release of GitLab, we want to achieve each of the following goals.
The list of Product KPIs are here and the definitions are here.
Like all teams, the Product team participates in GitLab OKRs. The Product team OKRs are tracked as issues in the Product project.
The process for doing so is:
KEY RESULT TITLE => 0% (Tracking to 0%). All issues should be tagged with the OKR label and assigned the appropriate quarter Milestone (eg, Q1 2019) such that they appear on this board.The Product team is responsible for the direction and financial measurement of the Gitlab.com strategy but does not carry direct P&L responsibility. Long term financial success for GitLab.com is measured as:
As this document and the direction page shows, there are a million things we want to do. So, how do we prioritize them and schedule things properly? Roughly speaking, we balance the following priorities:
Issues like security come in different severity levels. Lower severity means a lower priority, at ~S4/~P4 their priority is no different then other feature proposal.
Any new feature will have to meet the following requirements:
New features are prioritized based on several factors:
Every release of GitLab has to be better than the last. This means that bugs, regressions, security issues, and necessary performance and architecture changes always take up whatever capacity they require to ensure GitLab remains stable, secure and fast.
We hope to realize our vision, while making sure we're building things that our customers want. In practice this means that we aim to ship features that align with our vision, but also solve problems our customers have. These features bring the product forward, and build value for the largest group of people possible. For example, issue relationships is a highly requested feature that also fits neatly within our vision. Everyone will benefit from this.
In practice, it is not possible to always ship things that only fall within our vision. Other changes are prioritized and scheduled based on demand. An example would be a specific form of authentication that is only used in particular organizations. This is not a big win to all our customers, but if it's not too much work, it can be a very big win to a subset of customers. Demand can also come internally, such as things that'll help GitLab achieve goals within a team or specifically drive business goals such as specific EE features.
We take all priorities into account when planning and scheduling larger initiatives across the teams (such as: "we're integrating CI, so everyone has to contribute to this in some way"). Our teams always self-manage priorities with an eye towards global optimization. Still, most changes are scheduled at a team level, like: "make issues faster", or "add a new way to schedule pipelines."
GitLab is open-source, and encouraging and promoting a large ecosystem of contributors is critical to our success. When making prioritization decisions, it's important to heavily weight activities which will encourage a stronger community of contributors. Some of those activities are:
Product managers are not responsible for prioritizing contributions outside of their group. These contributions should be reviewed and merged swiftly allowing everyone to contribute, including non-product teams at GitLab.
To make it clear with an example, the CI/CD team might ask:
gitlab-ce?We schedule an issue by assigning it a milestone; for more on this see Planning a Future Release.
As a product manager, you will be assigned as the stable counterpart to a single group. At GitLab we abide by unique, and extremely beneficial guidelines when interacting with our groups. These include:
As an all-remote company, our crispness when it comes to responsibilities throughout the Product Delivery process was born out of necessity, but it pays untold dividends. Some of the benefits include:
As the GitLab product matures, we know we must make important workflows easier to use. As part of this effort, the UX department is collaborating with Product Management to select highly used workflows in stable areas of the product. We'll assess and score these workflows using the Experience Baselines methodology and then work together to prioritize recommended improvements.
This effort aligns with the Category Maturity goals that move areas of our product from minimal to viable to complete and, finally, lovable.
As described above, prioritization is a multi-faceted problem. In order to translate the priorities of any given group into action by our engineering teams, we need to be able to translate this multi-faceted problem into a flat list of priorities for at least the next release cycle. Product Managers are responsible for taking all these prioritization considerations and creating a clear, sequenced list of next priorities. This list should be represented as an issue board so that each team has a clear interface for making decisions about work. From this list, Engineering Managers and Product Managers can work together to determine what items will be selected for work in the immediate future.
This does not mean that items will be addressed in strict order - EMs and PMs need to be cognizant of dependencies, available skillsets, and the rock/pebbles/sand problem of time management to make the best decisions about selecting work.
Individual product managers must consider, and advocate for global optimizations within the teams they are assigned to. If your assigned team requires expertise (remember everyone can contribute) outside the team you should make all reasonable efforts to proceed forward without the hard dependency while advocating within the product management team for increased prioritization of your now soft dependencies.
If you have a request for additional help within your group, it is your responsibility to advocate for it. It's important to avoid generic "we need another Developer in X group" statements. Instead, create an issue which includes a concrete list of critical issues for no more than the next three months (example).
These issues should all be considered "top priority" and generally fall in one of the following three categories:
Include your proposal for other issues and groups outside of your own which should be considered a lower priority. Once you've reviewed the issue with your assigned Engineering Manager - ping your Product and Engineering Directors for review and refinement. If a global optimization which spans beyond your Department leaders is required, then the Senior Director of Engineering, VP of Product, and VP of Engineering should be pinged.
The following exit plan is an initial attempt to spell out when and how the loaned engineers will be released to their original teams. A new hire is expected to be brought up to speed in this context. The plan will be iterated and amended as necessary.
Week 1 is the first week a new hire joins the team.
| Phase | Timeline (recommendation) | What happens | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | Week 1 ~ 3 | On-loan engineer works full-time on receiving team to bring up new hire. | New hire's first week priority is onboarding. |
| Collaboration | Week 4 ~ 5 | On-loan engineer works half-time on receiving team while new hire is able to submit MRs of low complexity issues. | On-loan engineer's time may be dedicated completely in pair programming or code review, not necessarily making direct contribution to issues. |
| Handoff | Week 6 ~ 8 | New hire is now the owner. On-loan engineer transitions to a consultant role, reverting back to full-time in original team. |
These information sources may be useful to help you prioritize.
As GitLab grows we will need to create new groups, stages, and categories. During this transition period we need to globally optimize, and ensure that important issues are not blocked during the creation of a new group.
There are three common scenarios which may encounter these transition periods:
In each of these scenarios, a Group may become temporarily responsible for a future Group's issues and backlog. During this time, the responsible Group should balance the needs of our users and organization, prioritizing across the common backlog.
For every scenario above, we also need to ensure that the Engineering Metrics dashboard is updated to correctly track the new label. The label change affects both Issues and Merge Requests. The Stage and Group labels power the visualization and metrics in the Quality and GitLab Insights dashboards. Please create a new issue in the Triage Ops with the template label-change.md.
As the group(s) working on a Stage grow in size, a new Group may need to be formed so group sizes remain manageable. For example, today there is a single group for Manage, but will be splitting into control and framework groups.
To prepare for splitting a Stage into multiple Groups, we should:
categories.yml and stages.yml, assigning each Group a set of Categoriesdevops::manageControl or Frameworkdevops::manage backlogOnce the first PM or EM is hired, the new Group should be formed:
Control and Framework. Ideally, each group would have at least two backend engineers, but that is not always possible.stages.yml and team.yml to reflect the current group members.g_control and g_framework, and close the previous Slack channel (e.g. g_manage)As the rest of the EM/PM's are hired, they take over that role for the respective group.
The categories within a Stage will change over time, based on GitLab's direction and the market landscape. The groups within a Stage will need to be able to handle these changes, without issues falling in the cracks.
When the categories change, we should:
categories.yml and stages.yml, ensure all categories are assigned to a GroupWhen GitLab decides to address additional needs within the single application, a new Stage may need to be created. For example, Defend may be created to address additional needs beyond what Secure focuses on.
When a new Stage is added, and its Group has yet to be formed, we should:
devops::defend and DefendSecure, which will be initially responsible for the new Stagedevops::defend and devops::securecategories.yml and stages.yml, listing the new Stage with the members of the existing responsible GroupOnce the first PM or EM is hired, a new Group for the Stage should be formed:
Defend. Each Group should have at least two backend engineers.Secure on Secure and Defend on Defend.stages.yml to reflect the new Group and its members.As the rest of the EM/PM's are hired, they take over that role for the new Group.
As a PM, you must plan for the near term milestones (more detailed) as well as for the long term strategy (more broad), and everything in between. Considered as a spectrum, these form a nearsighted roadmap. This will enable you to efficiently communicate both internally and externally how the team is planning to deliver on the product vision.
Use calendar year (CY) dates for your issues, milestones, and lables to communicate timelines. Fiscal year (FY) does not translate well outside the company and roadmaps and vision pages are intended for external consumption. If you'd like to denote that an issue will be completed within a fiscal quarter use the month or GitLab release number for the last month in the fiscal quarter. E.g. use 12.4 (2018-10-22) instead of FY20-Q3. The issue can always be moved up in date and users/customers will seldom complain when functionality ships earlier than expected.
You need to create and maintain a strategy for your stage of the DevOps lifecycle with an outlook over the next four years. This lives in a page linked from the direction page, e.g. /direction/create.
Your strategy should be more concrete for things that are closer in time, and more general for further out items. The format of the 2018 vision is a great way to structure your strategy. You're free to do otherwise, just make sure it's easily consumable from the website.
The purpose of this page is to make it clear in what greater context individual changes fall. E.g. you might deliver a feature that allows admins to track username changes. That is not very interesting and hard to sell - but if it's clear that this is part of a greater push to improve auditing in GitLab, this becomes an enticing part of a greater whole.
The strategy for the stage should also include:
A category strategy is required which should outline various information about the category including overall strategy, what's next, and the competitive landscape. The category stategy should be documented in a handbook page, which allows for version control of the category strategy as well as the ability to embed video assets. One of the most important pieces of information to include in the category strategy is a tangible next step or MVC in order to push the category up the category maturity curve.
When creating a category strategy, it's important to focus your time and attention on specific actions and future iterations. It's natural to want to spend significant effort predicting the future, but iteration is one of our primary values.
Your category strategies should contain short paragraphs with lots of references to specific issues. Here is an example.
We use this category strategy template as the outline for creating the handbook pages. If additional headings are needed you are empowered to create and populate them in your category strategy.
You must keep these categories in sync with categories.yml and for new categories, link to the category strategy from the alt_link in categories.yml. Adding the category strategy as the alt_link will automatically create links in the home page and the categories page so people have an understanding of what each new category really means.
For categories that have already shipped, and that have a marketing product page, categories.yml should link to the product page, and the product page should then have a link to the category strategy (you can see an example for GitLab Pages with a Strategy button here). You should also link to your category strategy from your stage strategy page.
It's okay if your strategy changes over time. Ideally, what you'll change are minor things: links, issues, smaller features. Large, overarching initiatives are unlikely to change frequently - when they do, it's probably worth talking about. See the categories.yml file itself for more information about formatting and available values.
For each category, we track the improvements required to advance to the next level of maturity. These issues are indicated with an epic, and the planned feature set should be clearly visible from the corresponding category strategy page. e.g.:
The category epic should include:
For specifics of how the category strategy page should look, see the category strategy template.
In order to plan effectively around releases, as a PM you should have 3 months of detailed milestones scheduled at all times. The issues contained in these milestones are the ones you should be spending the most energy on (fleshing them out, adding detail, discussing, etc). These issues will go through a refinement period where Product, Engineering, UX, and other parties will discuss the proposal until a proper MVC proposal is reached (see Contents of an MVP for more detail). Most of the communication should happen within the issue comments, but some may happen offline (such as via Slack). Ensure that any relevant information that arise as part of an offline conversation is added to the issue title and issue description. As a PM you must ensure that issues have enough detail added to them before they become actionable as part of an iteration.
These next milestones will also help planning for capacity with engineering and UX in order to commit to the contents of the next release.
Our ability to iterate quickly is a measure of our efficiency, but our effectiveness is just as critical. As a product manager you are critical to us not just working correctly, but working on the correct things. You do that by prioritizing appropriately. Your prioritzation decisions will be enhanced if you maintain a sufficient understanding of the context in which you make them.
There is no limit to the amount of inputs you can utilize for making prioritization decisions. We've organized these mechanisms into three lists. One for those that primarily sense feedback from users, one that primarily senses feedback from buyers and another that senses internally generated feedback which could represent buyers or users. For new PMs consider these lists as guidance for places to ensure you are plugged in to maintain sufficient context.
User
Buyer
Internal
Your plan should also delimit which items will be delivered prior to the next summit, as well as prior to the end of the current calendar year. These delimitations will help determine both the internal and external communication for both product and marketing.
Refer to the Product Development Timeline for details on how Product works with UX and Engineering to schedule and work on issues in upcoming releases.
Product Managers assign milestones to issues to indicate when an issue is likely to be scheduled and worked on. As we consider more distant milestones, the certainty of the scope of their assigned issues and their implementation timelines is increasingly vague. In particular, issues may be moved to another project, disassembled, or merged with other issues over time as they bounce between different milestones.
The milestone of an issue can be changed at any moment. The current assigned milestone reflects the current planning, so if the plan changes, the milestone should be updated as soon as possible to reflect the changed plan. We make sure to do this ahead of starting work on a release. Capacity is discussed between the PMs and the engineering managers.
In general, closer-to-current-time milestones are assigned to issues that are higher priority. It's best to maintain prioritization of your groups issues using a fully prioritized issue board. The timing of prioritized items broken across releases reflects an approximate product plan, with more distant milestones reflecting increasing uncertainty.
The milestones are:
9.4, 9.5, etc.Next 3-4 releasesNext 4-7 releasesThese assigned milestones should be used as a signal for GitLab stakeholders and collaborators, to help them with their own respective workflows.
In addition, we have two special milestones: Backlog and Awaiting further demand. Product Managers assign these issues to milestones that they have reviewed and make sense, but do not fit within the upcoming release milestones due to either a lack of comparative urgency or because we have not yet seen enough user demand to prioritize the item yet. The best way to demonstrate urgency on either of these items is to vote on them and, if possible, add comments explaining your use case and why this is important to you.
Recommendation for when to change 'Awaiting further demand': Consider the number of people who use, not just have access to, the area impacted by the issue. When you receive enough feedback to be equal to a percentage of the power users, it is likely to consider moving the issue forward. Often public feedback only comes from a small percentage of people using or evaluating a feature or product. There needs to be a balance between waiting too long and acting too fast. In addition, there may be a tendency for more negative feedback than positive feedback, remember that people are passionate enough to care about this issue and it should be taken constructively.
Again, the milestone of an issue can be changed at any moment, including for both of these special milestones.
For a detailed timeline, see the product development timeline.
From time to time, there may be circumstances that change the ability for a team to ship the features/issues they committed to at the beginning of the iteration. These steps also apply when an issue is broken into multiple issues. When this happens, as a PM you must ensure the impacted issues and their milestones are updated to reflect the new reality (for example, remove deliverable tag, update milestone, etc.). Additionally, notify your manager of the shift and update the kick-off document to reflect the status of the item within the iteration (merged, not merged).
Our design system provides the means to work autonomously, without always needing UX insight and feedback. When problems can be solved using an already documented paradigm, you don't need to wait for UX approval to bring an issue to a reasonable state within a first iteration.
If lingering questions remain, subsequent iterations can address any shortcomings the feature might have.
As a product manager, you should carefully consider the costs and benefits when planning to introduce a breaking change. Breaking changes may heavily impact existing users, and it is your responsibility to minimize the negative effects.
If you want to introduce an urgent breaking change in a minor release (e.g. you need to provide support for a new feature that cannot be backward compatible), you have to consider how many users will be affected by the change, and whether the change can wait until the next major release instead.
If you evaluate that the impact on users is acceptable (e.g., you have evidence that the feature is not used significantly), and the change will allow many users to benefit of new features or to solve problems, follow this process:
#twitter Slack channel#customer-success and #sales Slack channels#support_self-managed and #support_gitlab-com Slack channelsEngaging directly with the community of users is an important part of our jobs. We do this through conference attendance, tweeting about our new features, engaging on Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites. There are a few Slack channels that can help you keep abreast of mentions:
A general list of conferences the company is participating in can be found on our corporate marketing project.
There are a few notable conferences that we would typically always send PMs to:
If you're interested in attending, check out the issue in the corporate marketing site and volunteer there, or reach out to your manager if you don't see it listed yet.
#product chat channels for questions that don't seem appropriate for the issue tracker or more generic chat channels.As a product manager, you're vastly more knowledgeable about GitLab than others. This means that you have the responsibility to always provide a balanced and complete view when discussing anything related to product. Other people won't have the same background and context you might have.
For example, when someone involved in sales asks you about upcoming issues in a particular area, you would respond with:
This seems obvious, but a slight misunderstanding can have big consequences, for example: promising a customer that something will be done by a certain date is very different than indicating that we're working on something and hope to have a first iteration in the near future.
Before shipping a new or updated feature, you are responsible for championing it, both internally and externally. When something is released, the following teams need to be aware of it as they will all need to do something about it:
You can promote your work in several ways:
To promote a major new feature internally, you can ask to host a GitLab <– internal promotion, but GitLab University is external? –> University, a company wide demo session. This is a great opportunity to make sure every one is on the same page.
Occasionally, we rally around a product vision, a direction to aim towards, to improve alignment internally and externally. We usually start out with a clear, simple concept like going faster from idea to production, or shipping complete DevOps. We announced our first Master Plan as part of our Series B funding announcement, and our second master plan with our Series C announcement. While the first iterations and presentations are great for aligning the product team and announcing the vision to the world, the text and slides only go so far to convey the depth of the vision. So, we usually iterate on the vision by fleshing it out more in various stages and communicating it in different ways, usually increasing fidelity over time.
This iteration may look like this, for example:
The interactive prototype video is a good time to reiterate the vision with a blog post.
Additionally, the direction page contains the specific vision for each devops stage along with links to the epics that contain the work to be done. We aim to use these epics and issues as the single source of truth for our plans, and as such we strive to maintain them up-to-date with the latest developments and plans.
Product marketers and managers should be joined at the hip. Just as a feature without documentation should not be considered shipped, benefits of GitLab that we're not actively talking about might as well not exist.
Product marketers rely on product managers to be guided to what is important and high impact. In general, you should:
As a PM you're responsible for making sure changes you've shipped are well represented throughout GitLab's documentation and marketing materials. This means that on release, features.yml is updated, documentation is merged and deployed, and any existing content is updated where necessary.
It's not acceptable to do this after the release. GitLab is very complex, and features and functions are easily missed, even those that provide significant value to customers (e.g. the many ways you can authenticate with GitLab).
You can recruit the help of the marketing and technical writing team if needed, but it's highly recommended to do small updates yourself. This takes less time and overhead than communicating what needs to be done to someone else.
Major features deserve proper attention from Product and Marketing. With a proper rollout, we'll have ample marketing opportunities and receive more feedback ahead of, during, and after the release.
Here is the ideal rollout schedule. For each step there is an indication for who is responsible for it.
As a PM, you are accountable for adding new features (under your umbrella) to the monthly release post, respecting the guidelines defined in the release posts handbook and its due dates. Be sure to go over all the details.
Every month, a PM will take the leadership of the release post, and will be responsible for delivering it in time.
For every monthly release, there is a blog post announcing features. The blog post should contain everything exciting or disruptive. All new features should appear in the blog post. We want to help people understand exciting features (which are often new), and increase adoption. Disruptive features may change workflows or even introduce unavoidable inconveniences. We want to anticipate questions and avoid confusion by communicating these changes through the blog post. Smaller tweaks and bug fixes don't necessarily need to be mentioned, but if interesting, can be included at the bottom of the post.
As PM we need to constantly write about the features we ship: in a blog post, internally to promote something, and in emails sent to customers.
While we want every PM to have a unique voice and style, there are some guidelines that one should take into account when writing about features. Let's highlight them with a concrete example, Preventing Secrets in your repositories, that we shipped in 8.12.
It's a bad idea to commit secrets (such as keys and certificates) to your repositories: they'll be cloned to the machines of anyone that has access to the repository. If just a single one is insecure, the information will be compromised. Unfortunately, it can happen quite easily. You write
git commit -am 'quickfix' && git pushand suddenly you've committed files that were meant to stay local!
GitLab now has a new push rule that will prevent commits with secrets from entering the repository.
Just check the checkbox in the repository settings, under push rules and GitLab will prevent common unsafe files such as .pem and .key from being committed.
Stakeholder collaboration and feedback is a critical competitive advantage here at GitLab. To ensure this is possible, and facilitate collaboration, you should maintain an updated single source of truth (SSOT) of your stage direction, category strategies, and plan, at all times. This equips anyone who wants to contribute to your stage’s product direction with the latest information in order to effectively collaborate.
Actively and regularly reach out to stakeholders. Encourage them to view and collaborate on these artifacts via these (non-exhaustive) opportunities:
Here is some guidance for new PMs to ensure your stage direction, category stratgies and plan are up-to-date and visible to critical stakeholders:
It's important to get direct feedback from our customers on things we've built, are building, or should be building. Some opportunities to do that will arise during sales support meetings. As a PM you should also have dedicated customer discovery meetings with customers and prospects to better understand their pain points.
As a PM you should facilitate opportunities for your engineering group to hear directly from customers too. Try to schedule customer meetings at times that are friendly to your group, invite them, and send them the recording and notes.
Before the meeting, ensure the Sales lead on the account has provided you with sufficient background documentation to ensure a customer doesn't have to repeat information they've already provided to GitLab.
During the meeting, spend most of your time listening and obtaining information. It's not your job to sell GitLab, but it should be obvious when it's the time to give more information about our products.
After the meeting, make sure all your notes and feedback land in issues.
Customer discovery meetings aren't UX Research. Target them to broad-based needs and plan tradeoff discussions, not specific feature review. There are two primary techniques for targeting those topics:
Set up a meeting by identifying what you're interested in learning and prepare appropriately. You can find information about how customers are using GitLab through Sales and version.gitlab.com. Sales and support should also be able to bring you into contact with customers. There is no formal internal process to schedule a customer meeting, but if the need arises, we can formulate one.
During and after spend most of your time listening and documenting information. Listen for pain points. Listen for delightful moments. Listen for frustrations. Write down your findings in GitLab issues. Read back and review what you've written down with the customer to ensure you've captured it correctly.
After the meeting make sure all your notes and feedback land in appropriate issues. Make appropriate adjustments to category strategies, feature epics, and personas. Share your findings with your fellow product managers and the sales and customer success account teams for the customer.
You can find some additional guidance on conducting Customer Discovery Meetings from these resources:
One specific, recurring opportunity to get direct feedback from highly engaged customers is the GitLab DevOps Customer Advisory Board. You may be asked by the CAB to present your stage at these meetings. Here are some guidelines when doing so:
When someone requests a particular feature, it is the duty of the PM to investigate and understand the need for this change. This means you focus on what is the problem that the proposed solution tries to solve. Doing this often allows you to find that:
Do not take a feature request and just implement it. It is your job to find the underlying use case and address that in an elegant way that is orthogonal to existing functionality.
This prevents us from building an overly complex application.
Take this into consideration even when getting feedback or requests from colleagues. As a PM you are ultimately responsible for the quality of the solutions you ship, make sure they're the (first iteration of the) best possible solution.
When someone posts information in the #competition channel that warrants creating an issue and/or a change in features.yml, follow this procedure:
I'm documenting thisfeatures.ymlRejecting a feature request or a merge request is not an easy thing. People can feel quite protective of their ideas. They might have invested a lot of time and energy in writing those ideas. You can be tempted to accept a feature only to avoid hurting the people who thought of it. Even Worse, if you reject an idea too harshly, you might discourage other people to contribute, which is something we should strive to avoid.
However, as the number of issues and merge requests grows incessantly, we should be diligent about rejecting features we are sure will not work out. It's better for everyone: for the product team, so we don't maintain a huge backlog of things we will never do anyway, and for the users who won't have to wait for our feedback indefinitely.
Note: it's fine to not respond to issues that we think have potential until they gather momentum.
Feature requests and merge requests can be rejected for the following reasons:
Don't forget to thank the authors for the time and effort taken to submit the feature request/merge request. In all cases and without exception, you should be nice and polite when interacting with users and customers.
Part of being a product manager at GitLab is maintaining engagement with analysts, culminating in various analyst reports that are applicable to your stage. In order to ensure that this is successful and our products are rated correctly in the analyst scorecards, we follow a few guidelines:
It's important to be closely connected with your product marketing partner, since they own the overall engagement. That said, product has a key role to play and should be in the driver's seat for putting your stage's best foot forward in the responses/discussions.
Product managers should take advantage of the internal customers that their stage may have, and use them to better understand what they are really using, what they need and what they think is important to have in order to replace other products and use GitLab for all their flows.
We want to meet with our internal customers on a regular basis, setting up recurring calls (e.g., every two weeks) and to invite them to share their feedback.
This is a mutual collaboration, so we also want to keep them up to date with the new features that we release, and help them to adopt all our own features.
The best way to understand the pain that users experience with our product is to experience it for yourself. Avoid dogfooding antipatterns.
As a PM, you should actively use every feature, or at minimum the ones for which you are responsible. All of them. That includes features that are not directly in GitLab's UI but require server configuration.
If you, as a PM, can't understand the documentation, or if you struggle to install something, would anyone else bother to do it? This hands-on experience is not only beneficial for understanding what the pain points are, but it also helps you understand what can be enhanced, such as a better optimized workflow.
As a Product function, it is our responsibility to ensure that the entire company dogfoods our product. We do this by:
Working with internal stakeholders comes with the added benefit of getting immediate feedback that reduces cycle times and de-risks early investments in new categories and features. Beyond feature velocity, internal dogfooding saves the money that we would spend on third-party tools.
Internal users can help quickly identify where workflows might break down or where potential usability or performance issues must be explored. We should heavily weigh internal feedback to shape our perspective on customer needs, and then compare it to what we know about both large and small customers (and if we’re unsure, then we should proactively ask).
When internal customers evaluate whether to dogfood, they should use the following process to assess internal feedback and requests:
internal customer label and mentions the relevant Product Mananger.Here is a partial list of features and functionality that currently exist outside the GitLab project, that should be brought inside. The rebuild in GitLab label adds an issue to this backlog, while dogfooding label documents the discovery of a feature or functionality that can be improved by being rebuilt in GitLab.
Most of GitLab is configured through the file gitlab.rb. It's tempting to add a new parameter in this file - it's easy, fast to do, and won't require adding a new UI element to allow the configuration of this new setting. However, changing this file requires you to reconfigure GitLab. To do that, you have to login to your server and type in commands to reconfigure your instance, possibly multiple times if you have more than one server.
This is not something that we can ask our customers to do. Only by using your own product and features will you realize that some practices should be avoided as much as possible.
You should strive to maintain an updated Epic roadmap for your group (here's an example). This can take considerable effort but doing so will ensure your issues are well organized according to the principals laid out below.
As part of our planning process it is important that you maintain a prioritized issue board for your group. It's customary to call these boards STAGE - GROUP - Planning and to configure them to filter to all issues with your group label and with each milestone as a column (here's an example).
As the DRI for prioritization it is your responsibility to ensure that all items on your Planning board are scheduled to a milestone and are prioritized both within and across milestones. This means the lowest priority in the current milestone would generally be the top priority in the next milestone.
In this regard your planning excercise is a complete prioritization of the near term issues.
You should create an issue if:
You should consider not creating an issue when:
When an issue is open, this signals that we're intending or considering implementing that change. It's important to close issues that we're not considering implementing in the near future, so that we avoid creating uncertainty with customers, and colleagues.
When closing an issue for this reason, make sure to update the issue body and leave a comment explaining why the issue is being closed. Issues can be reopened if we change our stance on them.
In order to clearly communicate to our stakeholders what we are going to do, it's critical that you not only provide the positive view (what we will do) but also articulate the negative view (what we will not do). While this should be communicated in stage and category strategies, it starts with issues:
As a Product Manager you should close issues that are:
When closing an issue, leave a comment explaining why you're closing the issue and link to anything of relevance (the other duplicate, the original feature that this is an iteration on, etc).
The 'not the next iteration' issues are the most important ones to resolve. It is very easy to create a large, comprehensive change with meta issues and lots of improvements, but it is essential that we iterate and ship the minimum viable change. We have to ship the iteration, wait for it to be used, and look for the feedback. As a product manager you must think about the bigger picture when making a proposal to improve the product. It's important to avoid writing this down as a bunch of issues. Come up with a direction but only record the first step. This way we can preserve the efficiency of our value of iteration. Closing issues whenever possible is an important part of your job and helps to keep a clear view of what is next. Consider using the following template to close an issue:
Closing this because XXX is something we should do first. When that feature is finished, we can learn from observing it in use. If we learn that this issue is still relevant, we can then reopen it. See /handbook/product/#when-to-create-or-close-an-issue for more detail about this policy.
Issues related to the same feature should be bundled together into an into an epic.
Features may include multiple issues even if we are just targeting an MVC. In this case, we should use an epic to collect all of them in one single place. This epic should have a start and an end date, and it should not span more than 3 releases, otherwise we run the risk of having epics drag on indefinitely.
When these issues are finished and closed, we should have successfully achieved the epic's goal. A good example of this kind of epic is the first iteration on a new feature. Epics representing MVCs should clearly state MVC at the end of the title and should have a parent epic relationship towards a category strategy or a meta epic.
We use epics to track many issues related to a specific topic, even if there isn't a specific timeline for shipping. These epics should be marked as ~meta, they may not have a specific start or end date, and may contain single iteration epics.
This is useful to have an overview of the future so participants and observers can understand how the pieces fit together. It can be really useful to understand the context of where we think we’re going so we can do a good job with the MVC.
Also, it conveys confidence internally and externally that we understand what we need to do when the MVC is particularly minimal. But don't get too caught up in long-term epics as you risk making proposals too complex, and overrepresenting certainty in the solution. Don't work too far in the future; we'll know better once we ship something small.
When creating a meta epic, there's a natural tendency to capture it as quickly as possible and then move on, but we must always strive to create a more specific epic for the first iteration, or the next iteration if something already exists. Describing an MVC means that the community can contribute more easily. Also, after distilling things down to a first iteration, you might realize it’s a lot easier than you thought, and prioritize it earlier. You can have an MVC without a meta issue. But you can't have a meta issue without an MVC.
When a product discovery step is needed to design a feature, PMs should create a separate issue (linked to the epic and implementation issue) for that research and design work to occur. We should not repurpose or otherwise reuse the existing implementation issue; doing so creates a risk of the issue being closed when the design work is complete and thereby losing track of the actual delivery of the item.
It's also important to ensure that product discovery issue is really even needed. It's possible in many situations to simply use the initial ticket for any design discussions - this will ensure all of the back and forth is in one place, avoiding the risk of losing track of parts of the discussion. If you find you are creating a issue simply to reserve time or people for execution, consider trying to secure the capacity in another way.
In certain cases a product discovery issue can be worked ahead of time, but a best-practice for good product development is to plan for and do this sort of research and development work within the milestone, including engineering and other stakeholders directly. Doing product discovery ahead of time, without the full group is generally not an effective approach.. Because we aim to deliver MVC features, there should almost always be enough time in a single release to both research and deliver a feature that adds value for our customers.
Be sure to follow the CE contribution guidelines on correct labeling practices for the product discovery label.
When relevant, you can include a wireframe in your issues in order to illustrate your point. You don't need to include wireframes on your own; our UX/design team can help us on that matter. Simply ping them if you need their help. We like Balsamiq for its simplicity and its sketch-style approach. If are struggling for inspiration, you can also paste screenshots of similar features in other products.
We assign the Meta label to issues that contain a large list of todos. If you are familiar with the Agile methodology, it's similar to an epic. At GitLab we have a short release cycle: the 22nd of every month. In some cases we won't be able to tackle all the tasks of a meta issue in a single release. This is why we centralize everything that we need to do in a meta issue, then break it down to issues small enough that they will fit into one release. Most of the time, meta issues generate lots of comments and passionate discussions. As a consequence, they always lead to something great.
Meta issues themselves generally should not be assigned to a milestone as the actual work is covered in sub-issues. Sometimes, for example if you want a meta issue to show up in our direction page for a given release, you may add a milestone, but only if you know for sure that all sub-issues will be completed by that milestone. Don't assign a milestone for when you're going to start a meta issue.
A general guideline is that an issue should only span one release. If we know an issue is going to span multiple releases, split it up into multiple issues.
Meta/epic issues are the exception to this rule, but should be kept to a minimum and only serve to guide broader subjects, not a single feature over multiple releases. This is to make sure we stick to our values of the minimally viable change. This means that feature issues should be closed after the first iteration whenever possible. We'll know more in the future and this keeps any remaining issues short and actionable.
In addition, it's often a good idea to throw away an original plan and start fresh. Try to do this more often, even more than you're comfortable with. Close the issue and create a new one.
When you don't have any specific tasks assigned, you should work on issues that are labeled Product work, in both the EE and CE projects. These are issues that need our attention the most.
When performing the role of Life Support PM only the following are expected:
Some discouraged responsibilities:
There is a weekly product management meeting open to any GitLab team-member. The structure of the meeting is as follows:
Agenda items in the order in which they appear in the meeting. The VP of Product will prioritize the Agenda items in advance of the meeting. The Zoom Link and meeting time are in the GoogleDoc.If you are a Product team member and are unable to attend the call you may add items for READ-ONLY to the agenda.
If you would like to join the call to discuss a specific agenda topic, please add it and any relevant context in advance of the meeting.
The VP of Product and their direct reports track our highest priority Product Team iniatives in the Product Leadership Issue Board. In order to maintain strategic focus, there is a WIP limit of 6 for Product Leadership items with the Doing label. We review the content and priority of this board during 1:1s or staff meetings. Directors can delegate and coordinate cross-product initiatives as needed based on the issues in this board.
As part of this Product Leadership Meeting we also review progress towards our OKRs.
Items for Discussion only should be prioritized in advance of the meeting by the meeting members, and ultimately the VP of Product in advance of the meeting.
Non-public items for discussion should be added directly to the agenda document for the meeting.
As a Product Manager you may need to make a decision on whether GitLab should engineer a solution to a particular problem, or use off the shelf software to address the need.
First, consider whether our users share a similar need and if it's part of GitLab's scope. If so, strongly consider building as a feature in GitLab:
If the need is specific to GitLab, and will not be built into the product, consider a few guidelines:
If after evaluating these considerations buying a commercial solution is the best path forward:
vendor_contracts template, ensure the justification above is included in the request.We believe that a single application for the DevOps lifecycle based on convention over configuration offers a superior user experience. The advantage can be quoted from the Wikipedia page for convention over configuration: "decrease the number of decisions that developers need to make, gaining simplicity, and not necessarily losing flexibility". In GitLab you only have to specify unconventional aspects of your workflow. The happy path is frictionless from planning to monitoring.
We're doubling down on our product for concurrent DevOps which brings the entire lifecycle into one application and lets everyone contribute. We are leaning into what our customers have told us they love: our single application strategy, our pace of iteration, and our deep focus on users.
Consider opportunities to take advantage of this unique attribute in early iterations. Integrating features with different parts of the application can increase the adoption of early iterations. Other advantages:
Although not every feature needs to be integrated with other parts of the application, you should consider if there are unique or powerful benefits for integrating the feature more deeply in the second or third iteration.
GitLab.com runs GitLab Enterprise Edition.
To keep our code easy to maintain and to make sure everyone reaps the benefits of all our efforts, we will not separate GitLab.com codebase from the Enterprise Edition codebase.
To avoid complexity, GitLab.com tiers and GitLab self-managed tiers strive to match 1:1.
Since we are not able to give admin access and do not yet have full feature parity between self-managed instances and GitLab.com, we avoid saying that there is a one to one match between subscription levels and tiers in marketing materials. This has been a source of confusion in the past for customers.
GitLab.com subscriptions work on a namespace basis, which can mean:
JaneDoe/*gitlab-org/This means that group-level features are only available on the group namespace.
Public projects get Gold for free. Public groups do not get Gold for free. Because:
Admittedly, this is complex and can be confusing for product managers when implementing features. Ideas to simplify this are welcome (but note that making personal namespaces equal to groups is not one of them, as that introduces other issues).
In addition to the two long term financial success criteria listed above, you can find the full list of metrics used by Product and Finance and their definitions here.
Keep in mind that the CEO is the DRI for pricing and tiers. Please review the entirety of the stewardship and pricing pages before making any determinations of which tier a given feature should go in.
Our stewardship principles determine whether something belongs in a paid tier. The likely buyer determines which tier.
The framework for determining initial tiers for features is provided in the pricing page. Use that as a guide when making determinations. Be sure to document your rationale for picking non-Core tiers in MVC issues. When talking about why a certain change goes into a paid tier instead of Core, mention the stewardship page in the handbook directly and link to it.
When talking about why a certain change goes into Core and not a paid tier, mention our promises. Sometimes we choose to put a feature in Core because it is easier to maintain in the long term.
Should you have any questions when making this decision do not hestitate to mention your manager, the VP of Product, or the CEO in the issue for clarification.
To propose bringing a feature to a lower tier, follow the process on the CEO pricing page.
If you are considering launching a paid feature, or changing any other aspect of pricing, follow this process:
Once a final determination has been made, consider making the confidential issue non-confidential. Ensure product marketing has a related website page for the feature and price. Ensure documentation is updated to accurately portray all facets of the feature. Consider a blog post to outline the feature.
All Starter, Premium, and Ultimate features must:
To make it possible to ship a feature for paid tiers, ideally the code is completely separate. For example, the frontend and backend of the feature only exist in the gitlab-ee project. However, this is not always possible.
In cases where it's preferable to have the backend code live in the gitlab-ce repository, it's acceptable to only ship the frontend for the feature in EE. In practice this makes the feature paid-only.
Occasionally we need to test large, complex features before we are confident that we'll be able to scale, support and maintain them as they are. In this case we have the option to release them as Alpha or Beta versions.
In general, we should avoid releasing Alpha or Beta versions of features. A minimally viable change should be viable and therefore should not need a pre-release. That said, if there is a situation where we have no valid alternative, the definitions of each stage is below.
It's never acceptable to make changes that risk any damage to existing production data accessed by our users.
Similar to Beta, but only available to selected users.
Passed the Production Readiness Review for GitLab.com, which means that it is:
Deprecating features follows a particular pattern. Use the language Deprecated or Removed to specify the state of a feature that is going to be or is removed.
Features that are deprecated or removed should be:
Naming new features or renaming existing features is notoriously hard and sensitive to many opinions.
The bar for renaming existing features is extremely high, especially for long-time features with a lot of usage. Some valid but not exclusive reasons are:
Use this section as guidance for using existing features and developing new ones.
/admin. Outside of that, admins are the same as the highest possible permission (owner).To keep the permissions system clear and consistent we should improve our roles to match common flows instead of introducing more and more permission configurations on each resource.
For big instances with many users, having one role for creating projects, doing code review and managing teams may be insufficient. So, in the long term, we want our permission system to explicitly cover the next roles:
All the above can be achieved by iteratively improving existing roles and maybe adding one more.
You can now find our security paradigm on the Secure Strategy page.
Also see our Secure Team engineering handbook.
Traditionally, applications only reveal valuable information about usage and performance to administrators. However, most GitLab instances only have a handful of admins and they might not sign in very often. This means interesting data is rarely seen, even though it can help to motivate teams to learn from other teams, identify issues or simply make people in the organisation aware of adoption.
To this end, performance data and usage statistics should be available to all users by default. It's equally important that this can be optionally restricted to admins-only, as laws in some countries require this, such as Germany.
Not all instance-data is available to all users in GitLab yet. This issue and the epic above should solve this.
GitLab is developed in English, but supports the contribution of other languages.
GitLab will always default to English. We will not infer the language / location / nationality of the user and change the language based on that. You can't safely infer user preferences from their system settings either. Technical users are used to this, usually writing software in English, even though their language in the office is different.
Fast applications are better applications. Everything from the core user experience, to building integrations and using the API is better if every query is quick, and every page loads fast. When you're building new features, performance has to be top of mind.
We must strive to make every single page fast. That means it's not acceptable for new pages to add to performance debt. When they ship, they should be fast.
You must account for all cases, from someone with a single object, to thousands of objects.
Read the handbook page relating to performance of GitLab.com, and note the Speed Index target shown there (read it thoroughly if you need a detailed overview of performance). Then:
You must prioritize improvements according to their impact (per the availability & performance priority labels). Pages that are visited often should be prioritized over pages that rarely have any visitors. However, if page load time approaches 4 seconds or more, they are considered no longer usable and should be fixed at the earliest opportunity.
In addition, to meet the ethical criteria of GNU, all our javascript code on GitLab.com has to be free as in freedom. Read more about this on GNU's website.
Deployments should never be fire and forget. GitLab will give you immediate feedback on every deployment on any scale. This means that GitLab can tell you whether performance has improved on the application level, but also whether business metrics have changed.
Concretely, we can split up monitoring and feedback efforts within GitLab in three distinct areas: execution (cycle analytics), business and system feedback.
With the power of monitoring and an integrated approach, we have the ability to do amazing things within GitLab. GitLab will be able to automatically test commits and versions through feature flags and A/B testing.
Business feedback exists on different levels:
Long term: how do larger efforts relate to changes in conversations, engagement, revenue
Your application should perform well after changes are made. GitLab will be able to see whether a change is causing errors or performance issues on application level. Think about:
We can now go beyond CI and CD. GitLab will able to tell you whether a change improved performance or stability. Because it will have access to both historical data on performance and code, it can show you the impact of any particular change at any time.
System feedback happens over different time windows:
Medium-Long term: did a particular effort influence system status
GitLab is able to speed up cycle time for any project. To provide feedback on cycle time GitLab will continue to expand cycle analytics so that it not only shows you what is slow, it’ll help you speed up with concrete, clickable suggestions.
The ability to monitor, visualize and improve upon cycle time (or: time to value) is fundamental to GitLab's product. A shorter cycle time will allow you to:
When we're adding new capabilities to GitLab, we tend to focus on things that will reduce the cycle time for our customers. This is why we choose convention over configuration and why we focus on automating the entire software development lifecycle.
All friction of setting up a new project and building the pipeline of tools you need to ship any kind of software should disappear when using GitLab.
We understand that not everyone will use GitLab for everything all the time, especially when first adopting GitLab. We want you to use more of GitLab because you love that part of GitLab. GitLab plays well with others, even when you use only one part of GitLab it should be a great experience.
GitLab ships with built-in integrations to many popular applications. We aspire to have the world's best integrations for Slack, JIRA, and Jenkins.
Many other applications integrate with GitLab, and we are open to adding new integrations to our technology partners page. New integrations with GitLab can vary in richness and complexity; from a simple webhook, and all the way to a Project Service.
GitLab welcomes and supports new integrations to be created to extend collaborations with other products. GitLab plays well with others by providing APIs for nearly anything you can do within GitLab. GitLab can be a provider of authentication for external applications. And GitLab is open source so people are very welcome to add anything that they are missing. If you don't have time to contribute and are a customer we'll gladly work with you to design the API addition or integration you need.
Machine learning (ML) through neural networks is a really great tool to solve hard to define, dynamic problems. Right now, GitLab doesn't use any machine learning technologies, but we expect to use them in the near future for several types of problems.
Signal detection is very hard in a noisy environment. GitLab intends to use ML to warn users of any signals that stand out against the background noise in several features:
Automatically categorizing and labelling is risky. Modern models tend to overfit, e.g. resulting in issues with too many labels. However, similar models can be used very well in combination with human interaction in the form of recommendation engines.
Because of their great ability to recognize patterns, neural networks are an excellent tool to help with scaling, and anticipating needs. In GitLab, we can imagine:
Similar to DeepScan.
Similar to Sourcegraph.
This is the Product handbook. If you (a Product team member, a GitLab team-member, or anyone else) see any typos or small copywriting errors here, consider correcting them with a merge request and merging it yourself (provided you have merge permissions to this repository), and mentioning a Product team member afterward as a courtesy so that we can thank you, since we have a bias for action and trust your judgement. If you have a larger change (or don't have merge permissions), create a merge request and mention any Product team member for further review so that we can incorporate your change (if it makes sense) as soon as possible. Please don't assign anybody to the merge request.
