Product Processes

Product Processes

Our Product Process

Team Meetings

  • Product Meeting (Bi-weekly)
  • Potential Topics:
  • Product Operations Office Hours (Bi-weekly)
  • Performance Indicator Meetings (Monthly)
  • Product Direction Showcases

R&D Investment Allocation

  • R&D Backfill Process

Planning Horizons

Product Development Flow

PM, EM, UX and SET Quad DRIs

  • Quad + Infra + Security Product Group DRIs

GitLab PMs aren’t the arbiters of community contributions

Managing your Product Direction

  • Navigating cross-stage or cross-section direction pages
  • What makes a Product Direction issue?
  • Moving the product direction forward

Prioritization: Ahead of kickoff

Top ARR Drivers

Kickoff meetings

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Product Milestone Creation

Understanding Milestones and Releases

Product Milestones Usage

Execution

Communication

Communicating with the Entire Product Function

Internal and external evangelization

Working with Content Marketing

Working with Product Marketing (PMM)

Product marketers rely on product managers to be guided to what is important and high impact. In general, you should:

  • always mention the appropriate PMM on epics and high level issues
  • regularly meet/talk async with the PMM that is aligned with your product area
  • proactively reach out for input when contemplating new features
  • involve PMM as early as possible with work on important changes
  • Adding Competitive Content to Use Cases

Marketing materials

Major feature rollout

Release posts

Writing release blog posts

Writing to inspire action

Writing about features

Recording videos to showcase features

Including epics

Dogfood everything

  • When do we dogfood?
  • For Product Team Members
  • Internal Customer DRIs
  • Dogfooding Process
  • Quickly converting ideas into MVCs
  • Crafting an MVC

QA RCs on staging and elsewhere

Feature assurance

Dealing with security issues

Introducing application limits

  • When implementing these for GitLab.com

Cross-stage features

Stages, Groups, and Categories

Product support requests

  • Requesting support from Product
  • Working with support requests

How to work as a PM

Invest the majority of your time (say 70%) in deeply understanding the problem. Then spend 10% of your time writing the spec for the first iteration only and handling comments, and use the remaining 20% to work on promoting it.

Prioritization

Engineering Allocation

  • Broadcasting and communication of Engineering Allocation direction
  • Communicating Engineering Allocation Progress
  • How to get a effort added to Engineering Allocation
  • Closing out Engineering Allocation items

Feature Change Locks

  • Prioritization sessions

Using the RICE Framework

RICE is a usefule framework for prioritization that can help you stack rank your issues.

Reach How many customers will benefit in the first quarter after launch? Data sources to estimate this might include qualitative customer interviews, customer requests through Support/CS/Sales, upvotes on issues, surveys, etc.

Higher reach means a higher RICE score:

  • 10.0 = Impacts the vast majority (~80% or greater) of our users, prospects, or customers
  • 6.0 = Impacts a large percentage (~50% to ~80%) of the above
  • 3.0 = Significant reach (~25% to ~50%)
  • 1.5 = Small reach (~5% to ~25%)
  • 0.5 = Minimal reach (Less than ~5%)

Impact How much will this impact customers and GitLab? Impact could take the form of increased revenue, decreased risk, and/or decreased cost (for both customers and GitLab). This makes it possible to compare revenue generating opportunities vs. non-revenue generating opportunities. Potential for future impact should also be taken into account as well as the impact to the GitLab brand (for example unlocking free-to-paid conversion opportunities).

Higher impact means a higher RICE score:

  • Massive = 3x
  • High = 2x
  • Medium = 1x
  • Low = 0.5x
  • Minimal = 0.25x

Confidence How well do we understand the customer problem? How well do we understand the solution and implementation details? Higher confidence means a higher RICE score.

  • High = 100%
  • Medium = 80%
  • Low = 50%

Effort How many person months do we estimate this will take to build? Lower effort means a higher RICE score.

  • Calculating RICE Score

    These four factors can then be used to calculate a RICE score via the formula:

    (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort = RICE

  • Async RICE Exercise

Issues important to customers

Community Considerations

SaaS-First Framework

  • Availability
  • Infradev
  • Enterprise Customer Needs
  • SaaS Features

Working with Your Group

  • User Experience (UX)
  • From Prioritization to Execution
  • Reviewing Build Plans
  • Prioritizing for Predictability
  • Private tools and dashboards for monitoring and KPI tracking

Global Prioritization

Rapid Action

  • What deserves Rapid Action
  • Rapid Action Process
  • Responsibilities of the DRI
  • Resolution

Borrow

  • When Requiring Specialty

Managing creation of new groups, stages, and categories

  • Splitting a Stage into multiple Groups
  • Adding a new category to a Stage
  • Adding a new Stage

Planning and Direction

  • Communicating dates
  • Planning is indispensable but adjust, iterate, and create value every milestone
  • The Importance of Direction
  • Section and Stage Direction
  • Category Direction
  • Maturity Plans
  • Next three milestones
  • Sensing Mechanisms
  • Managing Upcoming Releases
  • Planning for Future Releases
  • Shifting commitment mid-iteration
  • Utilizing our design system to work autonomously
  • Introducing a breaking change in a minor release

Iteration Strategies

  • Workflow steps
  • User operations
  • Functional criteria
  • Exception & error cases
  • Breaking down the UI
  • Refactors
  • Separate announcement from launch
  • Four phase transition
  • Iterate to go faster
  • Remote Design Sprint
  • Spikes
  • Other Best Practice Considerations

Issue Reviews

Community participation

  • Conferences

Stakeholder Management

  • What is a Stakeholder?
  • Updated SSOT for stakeholder collaboration

Working with Customers

  • Customer meetings
  • Sourcing Customers
  • Customer Advisory Board Meetings
  • Working with (customer) feature proposals

Competition Channel

How and when to reject a feature request

Assessing opportunities

  • Opportunity Canvas
  • Opportunity Canvas Lite
  • Opportunity Reviews

Analyst Engagement

Engage with internal customers

PNPS Responder Outreach

  • Instructions for Product leaders
  • Instructions for Group Managers and Product Managers
  • Process for reaching out to users
  • After the call

Cost profile and user experience

  • Tools to understand operational costs
  • Links to Learn more about Infrastructure cost management initiatives
  • Tools to understand end user experience

Roadmaps, Boards, Issues & Epics

Roadmaps

Boards

Feature templates

Epics

  • Epics for a single iteration
  • Meta epics for longer term items

Issues

  • When to create an issue
  • How to submit a new issue
  • Issue state
  • Wireframes
  • Long-lasting issues

Life Support PM Expectations

Product Manager Buddy System

MVC and New Config Reviews

Build vs “Buy”

Product Intelligence Guide

Page load performance metrics

Adding additional pages to performance testing

GitLab.com Service Level Objectives

Services and PM DRI’s

Product-Specific “People” ProcessesTalent Assessment Process

Talent Assessment Process

  • Calibration Strategy
  • Pre-Calibration Prep Work
  • Calibration Session Timeline

Span of Control Guidance