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Product Manager

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Role

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.

We recommend looking at our about page and at the product handbook to get started.

Core PM Responsibilities

As a product manager at GitLab, you are primarily responsible for:

  1. Understanding and communicating the problem of our users and customers
  2. Defining requirements for a solution that is loved by our users and customers
  3. 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:

  • Focusing on results.
  • 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.

Base Requirements Across All Levels

  • Experience in product management
  • Strong technically: you understand how software is built, packaged, deployed and operated
  • Passion for design and usability
  • Highly independent and pragmatic
  • Excellent proficiency in English
  • You are living wherever you want and are excited about the all remote lifestyle
  • You share our values, and work in accordance with those values
  • Have a growth mindset
  • Trust and empower your development group to deliver great products
  • Receptive to feedback or coaching
  • Strong bias for action
  • You make thoughtful decisions motivated by data and research
  • You develop strong opinions but are willing to change your mind
  • Bonus points: Experience with GitLab, Git, and the Git workflows
  • Bonus points: Experience building DevOps tools
  • Bonus points: Experience in working with open source projects
  • Bonus points: Experience engaging with customers in a B2B setting

Primary Performance Indicator for the Role

Stage Monthly Active Users

Career paths

In role levels

Read more about levels at GitLab here. Within the Product Management Career Track we use the Product Management Career Development Framework to determine requirements for PM roles.

Intermediate Product Manager

Beyond the base requirements, Product Manager requirements are outlined in the Product Management Career Development Framework.

Job Grade

The Product Manager is a grade 8.

Senior Product Manager

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.

Job Grade

The Senior Product Manager is a grade 9.

Expectations

Senior Product Managers are leaders at GitLab. In addition to doing the core of the PM job well, we expect them to do the following:

Drive the product in the right direction

  • Consistently deliver outsized impact to their stage and category KPIs or other GitLab KPIs

Take an active role in defining the future

  • Mastery of the competitive and market landscape of their product domain and understanding how this landscape impacts the product roadmap
  • Innovate within your product area by proposing ambitious features

Manage the product lifecycle end-to-end

  • Document ROI or impact for a given action, feature, or prioritization decision
  • Execute to deliver outsized results on the aforementioned ROI/impact analysis

Engage with stakeholders in two-way communication

  • Represent GitLab as a product and domain expert in front of industry analysts, strategic customers, industry events/conferences, and other events
  • Ability to present to C-level executives both internally at GitLab and externally to customers and prospects

Lead by example

  • Mentor less experienced Product Managers to enable them add more value sooner
Requirements

Beyond the base requirements, Senior Product Manager requirements are outlined in the Product Management Career Development Framework.

Principal Product Manager

The Principal Product Manager role extends the Senior Product Manager role expectations.

Job Grade

The Principal Product Manager is a grade 9.5.

Expectations

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.
Requirements

Beyond the base requirements, Principal Product Manager requirements are outlined in the Product Management Career Development Framework.

Senior Principal Product Manager

The Senior Principal Product Manager role extends the Principal role expectations.

Job Grade

The Senior Principal Product Manager is a grade 10.

Expectations

Senior Principal Product Managers are experts across multiple domains within GitLab. They are responsible for helping shape the future direction of the organization, assisting management to establish strategic roadmaps, and driving priorities to meet objectives. As a Director-level individual contributor position, Senior Principal Product Managers are expected to perform at a Grade 10 (Director) level according to our GitLab Job Framework and exemplify GitLab's leadership principles. In addition, Senior Principal Product Managers are expected to:

Drive execution of results

  • Senior Principal Product Managers are expected to drive outsized business results via their direct contributions. This can include shaping product prioritization, representing Product in GTM motions, unblocking R&D via a heavy focus on iteration or the generation and utilization of data to inform where we direct our R&D investment.

Contribute cross-domain expertise

  • Senior Principal Product Managers should possess a unique level of expertise as well as own specific product domains that extend across sections. This includes providing guidance on improvements within this specific domain with a focus on usability and user experience.

Elevate organizations

  • Senior Principal Product Managers are expected to improve entire sections via their outputs. These will include user, market, competitive and technology insights as well as instituting best practices for other Product Managers.
  • Senior Principal Product Managers will use their business skills by directly championing M&A (including researching and finding prospects). They will also collaborate directly with the GTM teams to enable sales on our capabilities that cross the entire product.
Requirements

Beyond the base requirements, Senior Principal Product Manager requirements are outlined in the Product Management Career Development Framework.

Moving to and moving from

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

Manage (Import)

We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of developer tools. Specifically, building importers that our customers find valuable, reliable and easy to use, thereby removing friction for migrating to GitLab and creating a more positive first impression when adopting GitLab.

Requirements

  • Experience with import/export/migration features and funcitonality
  • Experience with competitor products

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

Verify (Testing)

We're looking for product managers that can help us work on the future of DevOps tools; specifically, building out code quality analysis, micro-service testing, usability testing, and more.

Requirements

  • Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, and Testing 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

Platforms - Project Horse

We're looking for a product manager to define, launch, and mature a new service.

Requirements

  • Experience defining and launching new services, "zero to one"
  • Practical understanding of what it takes to run a SaaS service
  • Strong ability to work cross functionally, and through ambiguity

Responsibilities

  • Define, launch, and drive initial adoption of a new service
  • Work with Engineering and other teams to build a strong foundation (automated, re-usable, extensible)
  • Work closely with Go-to-market teams to ensure a successful launch
  • Refine pricing and minimum requirements of the service in partnership with the Pricing team
  • Manage P&L statement for the service
  • Work through ambiguity and document the process for future launches

Platforms - Multi-tenant SaaS

We're looking for a product manager to work closely with our Delivery and Scalability teams, which are responsible for the operational aspects of our multi-tenant SaaS service, GitLab.com. This role will involve defining the future of how GitLab delivers and operates software on multi-tenant SaaS systems.

Requirements

  • Strong technical and software architecture foundation
  • Practical understanding of what it takes to operate SaaS applications at scale
  • Familiarity with the full DevOps lifecycle and effective implementations

Responsibilities

  • Refine & prioritize the Scalability & Delivery backlog
  • Define the vision for how we operate SaaS services as a Product
    • Core framework and tools to empower other teams to deploy & operate their code
    • For example, patterns/framework for: Logging, Cost, Observability, Deployments, etc.
    • Make use of GitLab features where ever possible, and contribute back to the product
  • Error Budgets & Cost Dashboard tools/process (using data from above framework)
    • Set Error Budget & Cost targets, enable groups to see their status

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

Sharding

We're looking for a PM to define GitLab's long-term scalability strategy both for our GitLab.com SaaS platform and self-managed customers. This role is critical to define key customer requirements, for example increased service availability or support for multiple regions and then work with some of the best and most senior engineers at GitLab to execute on that strategy, for example by possibly implementing a Pod-like architecture.

Requirements

  • Experience working on scalability challenges for SaaS platforms and/or self-managed platforms
  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to translate complex requirements into actionable iterations
  • Confident working with executive stakeholders
  • Demonstrated ability to work in a cross-functional team

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
    • Experience working as a designer.
    • Experience building design systems.
    • Familiarity with SUS.

Product Planning

We're looking for a product manager to drive the roadmap for portfolio management functionality at GitLab! Your goal is to increase adoption of GitLab Plan capabilities with non dev personas including Product Managers, Project Managers and Executives while maintaining a delightful experience for dev personas.

Requirements

  • Passion for building tools that help teams be more effective.
  • Experience working on products where executives are the target end users.
  • Knowledge of Plan space would be ideal. This includes:
    • Scaled agile planning methodologies like SAFe, Spotify and LeSS.
    • Value stream management.
    • Understanding of various organizational models and their trade-offs.

ModelOps (Anti-abuse)

We're looking for a Product Manager to drive the roadmap for Anti-Abuse at GitLab! Your goal is to help GitLab protect our flagship SaaS product, GitLab.com and self-managed customer instances from abuse and misuse. You’ll help eradicate fake accounts, proactively identify and remove bad actors, and help GitLab better understand our legitimate users. This role will directly protect the stability, performance, and scalability of GitLab for millions of users across the world ensuring they can effectively use GitLab for their daily development needs.

Requirements

  • Experience working to protect SaaS products from abuse.
  • Strong understanding of abuse tactics for SaaS products.
  • Practical understanding of challenges of running massive public SaaS platforms with open registration and user accessible compute resources.
  • Knowledge of techniques to identify abusive usage from legitimate user activity.
  • Experience with global products across different markets, cultures, and languages worldwide.
  • Demonstrated ability to work in a cross-functional team in a large Product organization.

Compensation Calculator

To find out more about the compensation for this role, please apply to a role first. Once selected for a screening call, you'll be able to sign up here to view our compensation calculator. Be sure to use the same email address for both.

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.

Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:

  1. Mission: Everyone can contribute
  2. Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
  3. Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
  4. Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
  5. Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
  6. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
  7. Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
  8. Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
  9. Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Friends and Family days
  10. Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices

See our culture page for more!

Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.

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