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 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 VP of Product Strategy 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

Base Requirements Across All Levels

• 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
• Ability to use GitLab
• Bonus points: experience with GitLab
• Bonus points: experience in working with open source projects

Primary Performance Indicator for the Role

• Stage Monthly Active Users

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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.

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

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 plus Product Manager role expectations.

Responsibilities

Bring special expertise in a specific domain or Product Management skill

• Principal Product Managers should possess a unique level of expertise in a critical domain area or product management skill.

Ability to coach others

• Principal Product Managers are expected to help raise the bar for the rest of the Product Management team, by a demonstrated ability to coach others in the area of their expertise.

Requirements

Beyond the base requirements, 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 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: 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.

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.

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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

Telemetry

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 systems and models

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
• Previous experience managing system level integrations (bonus points for billing & licensing systems)

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

Memory

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 identifying and prioritizing performance bottlenecks, establishing a performance testing framework, and leading needed architectural changes for additional scalability.

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
• Hands-on experience with databases, caching strategies, and web applications

Relevant links

• Product Handbook
• Engineering Workflow

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, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity and inclusion, 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. Work with helpful, kind, motivated, and talented people.
2. Work remote so you have no commute and are free to travel and move.
3. Have flexible work hours so you are there for other people and free to plan the day how you like.
4. Everyone works remote, but you don't feel remote. We don't have a head office, so you're not in a satellite office.
5. Work on open source software so you can interact with a large community and can show your work.
6. Work on a product you use every day: we drink our own wine.
7. Work on a product used by lots of people that care about what you do.
8. As a company we contribute more than we take, most of our work is released as the open source GitLab CE.
9. Focused on results, not on long hours, so that you can have a life and don't burn out.
10. 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 and guides.