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- 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
- 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
Read more about levels at GitLab here.
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
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
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
- 7+ 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: 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.
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
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
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
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, with Elasticsearch experience a plus
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
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.
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 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:
- 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.
