Product Manager

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 onboarding to Concurrent DevOps: users may not be aware of its potential, we will show them how easy and powerful it is! We want to support large teams working on mission-critical software across the entire company, and also single developers starting a new visionary project from scratch.

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 encourage people to apply even if they don't have an established background in this role yet, but they feel this page describes exactly what they have a strong attitude for. Product managers always start off somewhere, and it's ok if that somewhere is GitLab.

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

Responsibilities

Drive the product in the right direction
- Build an effective roadmap to prioritize important features properly
- Take high-level feature proposals and customer problems and break them into small iterations that engineering can work on
- Balance new features, improvements, and bugfixes to ensure a high velocity and a stable product
- Consider the business impact, ROI, and other implications when taking important decisions
Take an active role in defining the future
- Contribute to the product vision, together with the Head of Product and VP of Product
- Create and maintain a vision for your product area
- Create and maintain the vision for each product category
- Innovate within your product area by proposing ambitious features
- Follow innovation in your product area
- Communicate and evangelize your product vision internally and among the wider community
Manage the product lifecycle end-to-end
- Follow feature development end-to-end; provide guidance and feedback to engineers and designers; ensure everyone is aligned
- Be the voice of the customer and the subject-matter expert for your group
- Contribute to documentation, blog posts, demos, and marketing materials for product features
- Collaborate with other Product Managers, UX, and engineers in cross-area features to build a single application
- Manage the uncertainty in an efficient way, adjusting plans to new working conditions
- Drive teams to acquire necessary data in order to back assumptions, show value, and drive prioritization
Engage with stakeholders in two-way communication
- Assist Sales, Support, Customer Success, and Marketing as the subject-matter expert for your area
- Talk to customers and engage with the community regularly
- Engage with analysts on briefings and product evaluations
- Work with the entire Product team to share improvements and best practices

You are not responsible for

A team of engineers: you will take the lead in decisions about the product, but not manage the people implementing it
Capacity planning: you will define priorities, but the Engineering Manager evaluates the amount of work possible
Shipping in time: you will work in a group, but the group is responsible for shipping in time, not you

Requirements

Experience in product management
Strong understanding of Git and Git workflows
Knowledge of the developer tool space
Strong technically: you understand how software is built, packaged, and deployed
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
Bonus points: experience with GitLab
Bonus points: experience in working with open source projects

Career paths

In role levels

Intermediate Product Manager

Product Manager requirements and responsibilities are outlined above.

Senior Product Manager

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

Responsibilities

Drive the product in the right direction

Consistently deliver outsized impact to IACV or other Product and CEO 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

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

5+ years product management experience

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 customer needs. As a result they've been found to start their journey to product management from the following disciplines:

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.
UX: UX designers and leaders have built a great understanding of the personas, and pain points which their product is targeting. 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.

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 greaet 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

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 DevOps tools; specifically, building out continuous delivery (CD), release orchestration, features flags, and more.

Requirements

Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, and Release Automation
Understanding of deployment infrastructure and container technologies
Practical understanding of container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes

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 such as ChatOps.

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

Serverless

We're looking for product managers to help us work on the future of DevOps tools; specifically, building out serverless application and function management.

Requirements

Strong understanding of DevOps and cloud-native application development
Understanding of deployment infrastructure and serverless functions
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

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

Defend

Strong understanding of SIEM and operational security
Practical understanding of deployment infrastructure and container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes

Growth

Get more people to use and contribute to GitLab, mainly the Community Edition (CE). Marketing gets us awareness and downloads. Your goal is to ensure people downloading our product keep using it, invite others, and contribute back. You report to the VP of Product.

Goals

Conversion of download to 30 day active (install success * retention)
Growth of existing CE installations (growth of comments measured with usage ping)
Growth in the number of new people that contributed merged code

Possible Improvements

Auto install let's encrypt
Check open to new users by default
Check invite by email function
Usage ping for CE
Ensure installers are very simple
First 60 seconds with a product
Measure contributors like a SaaS funnel (activation, retention)
Improve data for Usage ping EE
Improve zero-states of project (hints on first action)
New feature show-off / highlighting
Great experience when not logged in (commenting)
Great experience when not a project member (edit button works)
Make it easier to configure email
Make it easier to configure LDAP

You'll work with

Other PM's
Developers (implement some things self, some with help of experts)
Community team
Developers
Merge request coaches

Requirements

Deep understanding of UX and UI
You've built web applications before in Ruby on Rails (be it personal or professional)
You're pragmatic and willing to code yourself
You're able to independently find, report and solve issues and opportunities related to growth in the product
Good understanding of Git
Able to make wireframes and write clear, concrete product specifications

Responsibilities

Plan and execute on improvements in GitLab related to growth
Write specs and create wireframes to communicate your plans
Ship improvements every month and make it possible to report on those improvements
Do data analysis whenever useful
Assist the rest of the team with topics related to growth
Build and expand tools related to growth (version.gitlab.com and others)

Scaling

We're looking for a product manager to elevate the broader product team. Your goals are to ensure important inputs are effectively managed, tackle challenges that do not neatly fit within a stage, and do whatever is needed most.

Requirements

Deep understanding of the full DevOps lifecycle and tools
Excellent critical thinking skills; come up to speed quickly and determine a good solution
Clear and concisely communicate to others in writing
Strong organizational skills

Responsibilities

Attend all Product:CEO and Product Development meetings, record and follow up on action items
Effectively shepherd feedback from the executive team, primarily the CEO
Investigate new initiatives and technologies which could impact GitLab
Improve the process and tools to make the product team more effective
Do whatever is needed most

Relevant links

Meltano (BizOps Product)

We're looking a product manager to shape the future of data science tools. You would be taking GitLab's approach to complete devops, and apply it to Meltano. Meltano is an open source convention-over-configuration framework for data science, analytics, business intelligence, and data science. We will leverage version control, CI, CD, Kubernetes, and review apps. We aim to help customers answer difficult questions e.g., how can I acquire the highest customer lifetime value (LTV) at the lowest customer acquisition cost (CAC). We are creating open source, deeply-integrated tools without using traditional BI tools.

It'll be your job to work out what we are going to do and how. We need a full-stack PM, i.e. someone who can write code, update pipelines, and do whatever it takes to get things done and shape the future of data science.

Requirements

Strong understanding of business operations, business intelligence, data warehousing, etc.
Experience with CI/CD and containers. Knowledge of Kubernetes and GitLab CI/CD a plus.

Compensation

Components

Compensation at GitLab consists of:

Base salary
Options
Bonus in some functions
Discretionary bonus
Retirement contributions in eligible regions
Pay for equipment
Remote work
Unlimited time off
Benefits

Base salary calculator

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Annual Compensation

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Apply

Please note that if we are actively hiring for a position, you will see it listed on our jobs page, where all of our current openings are advertised. To apply, please click on the name of the role you are interested in, which will take you to our applicant tracking system (ATS), Greenhouse.

Avoid the confidence gap; you do not have to match all the listed requirements exactly to apply. Our hiring process is described in more detail in our hiring handbook.

About GitLab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 1,000 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, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, 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:

Work with helpful, kind, motivated, and talented people.
Work remote so you have no commute and are free to travel and move.
Have flexible work hours so you are there for other people and free to plan the day how you like.
Everyone works remote, but you don't feel remote. We don't have a head office, so you're not in a satellite office.
Work on open source software so you can interact with a large community and can show your work.
Work on a product you use every day: we drink our own wine.
Work on a product used by lots of people that care about what you do.
As a company we contribute more than we take, most of our work is released as the open source GitLab CE.
Focused on results, not on long hours, so that you can have a life and don't burn out.
Open internal processes: know what you're getting in to and be assured we're thoughtful and effective.

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.