Product Managers at GitLab have a unique opportunity to define the future of the
entire DevOps lifecycle. We
are working on a single application that
allows developers to invent, create, and deploy modern applications.
We want to facilitate Concurrent DevOps so that teams can work simultaneously instead of sequentially, unleashing collaboration across organizations.
We work in a very unique way at GitLab, where flexibility and independence meet
a high paced, pragmatic way of working. And everything we do is in the open.
We are looking for talented product managers that are excited by the idea to
contribute to our vision. We know there are a million things we can and want to
implement in GitLab. Be the one making decisions.
As a product manager at GitLab, you are primarily responsible for:
Understanding and communicating the problem of our users and customers
Defining requirements for a solution that is loved by our users and customers
Ensuring our product is viable for GitLab
In addition, as a PM, you also play a critical role in the regular development and operating cadence of GitLab. There are a few specific required tasks that the PMs are directly responsible for in Core PM Tasks.
How does a PM ensure they are solving a problem for our users?
PMs should spend a significant amount of time understanding the problems our users face. Deeply understanding the problem is the foundation for all other activities PMs take on; understanding the problem enables the PM to define the vision and prioritize effectively.
In order for a PM to deeply understand the problems our users are facing and determine which are the important problems to solve, they can do the following:
Have a deep knowledge of each category's problem space
Regularly talk with users and customers
Communicate with users on issues and epics
Work with Pre-Sales and Post-Sales to connect with customers and prospects
Uncover insights through UX Research
Use other sensing mechanisms. It is through user interactions that we can begin to understand what problems our users are facing and identify how we could make product improvements to help eliminate the pain points. These user interactions can present themselves in many different ways.
How does a PM ensure we build lovable products?
Producing a lovable product requires more than a deep understanding of the problem. At GitLab, we build lovable products by adhering to our values. PMs are expected to be the ambassador of the GitLab values by:
Embracing iteration. This is the secret to GitLab moving fast, as we get constant feedback and maintain forward momentum toward GitLab's huge vision. PMs play a large role in unlocking iteration as a competency.
Being transparent. This will enable both our development group to contribute and just as important, enable the wider GitLab community to contribute.
Being efficient. PMs should advocate for the boring solution, optimize for the right group, be the manager of one, always write things down, so they can help their groups also be efficient.
Being collaborative. PMs ultimately don't ship anything on their own. PMs need to be a great teammate so that the development group can produce great work.
Being someone who helps make GitLab a work place of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, so that everyone can come to GitLab and do their best work.
How does a PM ensure business viability for our product?
It is not sufficient to just know the problems. It is also insufficient to have a solution to the problem that our customers love. PMs also need to ensure that the solution is viable for GitLab.
Senior Product Managers are expected to be experts in their product domain and viewed as such to the community and internally at GitLab. They are expected to prioritize and manage their products with minimal guidance from leadership or other product team members.
Bring special expertise in a specific domain or Product Management skill
Principal Product Managers should possess a unique level of expertise as well as own specific domains within the product that extends cross-stage. This includes providing guidance on improvements within this specific domain with a focus on usability and user experience.
Ability to coach others
Principal Product Managers are expected to coach and mentor other Product Managers as well as assist with their career development. This includes being a “PM buddy” with regular check-ins on larger initiatives with a focus on elevating the Product Manager's Career Development Framework track skills.
The career paths to and from product management positions are varied, but there are some common patterns.
Moving to Product Management
Successful product managers have a passion for solving problems. As a result they've
been found to start their journey to product management from the following disciplines:
Engineering: Engineers understand deeply how the product is built and how they work. A desire to understand the user problem of their product
and to further influence product direction can lead engineers to pursue Product Management roles.
UX: Product Designers and UX leaders have built a great understanding of the personas and pain points their product
targets. A desire to further influence not just the experience but the way the features alleviate those
pain points can draw UX professionals to Product Management.
Engineering Manager: Engineering team leaders who've gained a strong understanding of the customer persona, pain
points and direction of a product often want to further influence that direction by transitioning to Product Management roles.
QA/QE: Quality engineers are responsible for the validation of a product and service. Those who
have a passion for understanding and testing how products are used in the real world by real users often
find a strong alignment to the Product Management function.
Product Marketing: Product Marketers with a desire to have more influence in shaping the product often
migrate to the Product Management function.
Customer Success: Customer facing functions like Solutions Architects, Technical Account Managers, and
lead Support techs who've developed a strong understanding of customers' needs in the product often transition
to Product Management out of a desire to shape the direction of the product.
Moving from Product Management
Within their role, Product Managers are empowered to interact and learn more about functions they are interested in.
Whether that be Marketing, Customer Success, Support, Finance or Engineering - Product Managers are encouraged (and often
required) to understand other functions as part of their daily responsibilities. As such there is plenty of room for
Product Managers to transition to roles outside of the Product Management team. Some of those include:
Engineering Leadership: Product Managers often find a desire to dive deeper into Engineering problems, or grow
mentor and lead engineering teams.
Product Marketing: Product Managers often gravitate to how we target, message and deliver value to our customers.
Product Marketing roles are an excellent way to further that expertise.
Customer Success: Few people know our products as well as Product Managers, and product managers who enjoy directly
solving customers problems on a daily basis make great fits for Customer Success roles.
General Management: As a result of their exposure to a wide variety of functions, Product Managers often make a
transition from Product Management to General Management.
Specialties
Manage (Workspace)
We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of developer tools. Specifically, building out our lovable support for GitLab by driving strategy to help organizations prosper with workspace functionality that enables them to manage Gitlab for their organization.
Requirements
Understanding of permissions and separation of duties
Knowledge of the Authentication and Authorization space, such as: SAML, LDAP, OAuth, IdAAS, SSO, SCIM
Manage (Optimize)
We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of developer tools. Specifically, building out our lovable support for GitLab by driving strategy to help organizations prosper with Observability and Value Stream Analytics. This role takes advantage of the GitLab's end-to-end DevOps platform and help our users understand the efficiency of their DevOps processes and identify bottlenecks and waste as well as learn best practices from high performing teams.
Requirements
Strong understanding of DevOps and cloud-native application development
Understanding of Analytics and Metrics
Create
We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of developer tools. Specifically, building out our lovable support for GitLab by driving strategy around git, source code management, code review, and the developer experience.
Requirements
Strong understanding of Git and Git workflows
Knowledge of the developer tool space and workflows
Practical understanding of source code management tools such as GitHub, Phabricator, or Gerrit
Verify (CI)
We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of DevOps tools; specifically, building out continuous integration (CI), code quality analysis, micro-service testing, usability testing, and more.
Requirements
Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, and Release Automation
Practical understanding of container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
Release (CD)
We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of the Release stage and deployment capabilities at GitLab. The PM will work on building out continuous delivery (CD), release orchestration, features flags, and more.
Requirements
Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, and Release Automation
Understand the challenges of complex, enterprise-level deployment
Practical understanding of container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
Practical understanding of progressive delivery and advanced deployment techniques
Configure
We're looking for product managers to help us work on the future of DevOps tools; specifically, building out configuration management and other operations-related features.
Requirements
Strong understanding of CI/CD, configuration management, and operations
Understanding of deployment infrastructure and container technologies
Practical understanding of container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
Package
We're looking for product managers to cover the Package stage of our DevOps lifycle. This candidate will work specifically on building out packaging categories and features such as Docker container registry and binary artifact management.
Requirements
Strong understanding of CI/CD and package management
Understanding of the complexity of managing multi-artifact application deployment
Practical understanding of deployment infrastructure and container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
Monitor
We're looking for product managers to build the future of Monitoring stage. This PM will work to build out the Monitor categories and features, such as Incident Management, Synthetics, and observability tools.
Requirements
Strong understanding of the SRE persona and their workflow
Practical understanding of observability
Distribution
We're looking for product managers to support our Distribution group and manage our installation, upgrade, and configuration process for our self-managed customers.
Requirements
Strong understanding of system administration
Practical understanding of deployment infrastructure and container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
Secure
We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of developer tools; specifically, building out application security testing, including static analysis and dynamic testing.
Requirements
Strong understanding of CI/CD and automated security testing
Practical understanding of deployment infrastructure and container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
Protect
Strong understanding of SIEM and operational security
Practical understanding of deployment infrastructure and container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes
Product Intelligence
We're looking for product managers that can help us mature our product usage data set to enable better decision making across the company.
Requirements
Strong analytical skills, including an ability to translate business needs back to underlying data sets and structures
Previous experience with data and analytics technologies
Excellent communication skills at all levels, including e-group
Growth
We're looking for Product Managers to help us grow our customer base by improving our net new signup flow (Acquisition), trial flow (Conversion), upgrades & seat adds (Expansion), and renewals (Retention).
Requirements
Well versed in experimentation and A/B testing
Strong analytical skills and a hypothesis driven mindset
Previous experience leveraging common frameworks and growth techniques
Fulfillment
We're looking for a PM to ensure an excellent purchase, trial, upgrade, seat addition, and renewal experience for GitLab customers. This role will involve creating a flexible and powerful billing and licensing system upon which we can build world class customer experiences. The role will also involve important system level integrations with key 3rd party systems such as Zuora and Stripe.
Requirements
Strong business operations skills and an ability to think systematically about complex workflows and work cross-functionally to ensure an excellent end-to-end customer experience
Previous experience with high scale billing & licensing systems
Familiarity with commercial best practices for no touch, sales assisted, and partner assisted transactions
Excellent communication skills at all levels, including e-group
Infrastructure
We're looking for a product manager to work closely with our Infrastructure teams, which own the operational aspects of running GitLab.com as well as other services.
Requirements
Deep understanding of the full DevOps lifecycle and tools, with actual experience working in a DevOps role a plus
Practical understanding of what it takes to run internet applications at scale
Responsibilities
Own prioritization, validation, and scoping of strategic projects and initiatives for the Infrastructure teams
Champion dogfooding of the GitLab product wherever possible; if the efficacy of dogfooding is in doubt, drive a thoroughly documented build/buy analysis
Champion cross-product outcomes like fast response times and low operational costs on behalf of the Infrastructure teams
Ensure the Infrastructure teams are tightly connected in with the mainline Product and Engineering teams
Search
We're looking for a product manager to make finding things easy and delightful in GitLab. Your goals are to improve the global search experience within GitLab, and ensure the solution can scale from small self-managed instances to GitLab.com.
Requirements
Strong understanding of search engines, algorithms, and workflows. Direct Elasticsearch experience is a plus
Familiarity with Search workflows, and helping users find what they are looking for
Understanding of the DevOps lifecycle and tools a plus
Geo
We're looking for a PM to improve our disaster recovery, global performance, and backup and restore capabilities. GitLab is a business-critical application and keeping GitLab available even when things go wrong is critical to the success of our customers. Your goal is to build robust, scalable and easy to use solutions that help systems administrators stay within their business continuity targets (RTO and RPO) and to ensure that GitLab's users have a great user experience wherever they are located.
Requirements
Experience building business-critical applications, such as backup solutions, disaster recovery, highly-available systems.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to translate complex requirements into actionable iterations
Demonstrated ability to work in a cross-functional team
Experience in agile best practices is a plus
Memory & Database
We're looking for a PM to drive improvements to the responsiveness and scalability of GitLab, and establish best practices for performance oriented development. This role will involve proactively identifying and prioritizing performance hotspots, leading needed architectural changes for additional scalability and efficiency, and delivering improvements to our development process for writing performant code.
Requirements
An understanding of how complex applications function, and an ability to think systematically about application flows
Strong analytical skills, and a quantitative approach to incremental performance improvements
Ability to translate best practices into product changes for GitLab
Hands-on experience with databases, caching strategies, and web applications
Ecosystem
We're looking for a product manager to drive the strategy for GitLab as a platform. Ecosystem's goal is to make integrating with, extending the functionality of, or contributing to GitLab accessible to all of our users.
Requirements
Experience building products where developers and 3rd party systems are the primary customers.
Familiarity with technologies that facilitate system integration including SDKs, APIs and Webhooks.
Understanding of the DevOps lifecycle tools and integrations is a plus.
First-hand experience in software engineering and architecture.
Foundations
We're looking for a product manager that can help us improve GitLab user experience and tie experiences together across a platform. Specifically, building out our lovable support for GitLab by driving strategy to build and rollout the GitLab Design System and cross-stage foundational experiences like documentation and navigation.
Requirements
Experience working on internal products consumed by other teams within a company.
Excellent communication skills at all levels, including working with executive stakeholders.
Understanding of the UX design best practices. Bonus points if
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About GitLab
GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is
a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed.
We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs
and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can
contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative
work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.
We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom,
efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging,
boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality,
work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our
primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of
life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.
