Product Marketing Meeting (weekly) 2021-06-28

i can record and uh we don't have a ton of items to get to uh and i might be able to do one that might be fun if we have a little bit of time um so corporate events uh they i think i saw a little i put this in in slack and i saw a little bit of uh kind of noise around it which was good um you know the the nutshell here is as we've kind of restructured and tried different things um the event support that we need isn't as nailed down as it needs to be uh so the current tactic that we're going with is go to market team signs up and kind of sponsors that event so you support it as a pmm your campaign manager does the campaigns for that event et cetera et cetera et cetera uh i don't see anyone in the uh maybe their comments in the issue i don't see the the header updated yet i thought we had in slack sort of farmed each one of them out that's so i guess the the next so it looks like tai put in some folks it looks like this looks good so that let's see need support from gtm teams so i guess the ask would be um to work with your gtm team so so did let me ask that i saw some slack i think in our slack but did you all uh were you all able to connect with like your gtm teams uh on slack only and on the issue actually yeah same not even not in real time but you know source feedback i got one person to respond so far so it may end up cindy being you and i just picking the one that we want to do and then they can back us up if we don't get any more feedback yeah do y'all um does anybody have like a regular sink still are those all been cancelled or is there cases don't have a regular yeah we're on like a two-week cadence okay yeah git ops has been cancelled after the enablement cool so i'm just trying to catch up with the thread um so it looks like maybe uh platform on reinvent ci cd on google next and get ops on kubecon does that sound right yeah yep that's where we were last i heard cool so then i think um i think we can we can help the corp events team they do they do a lot of like uh cat hurting and you know keep on tracking people down so i think if if this team can take the mission to like try to help track that down so if you you know get the commitment specifically from your campaign managers hey like we're signing up for kubecon you know can you comment on the issue that yes i can commit to this etc etc etc you know um so that just so that they can get that that event support but that looks good and i appreciate uh thanks for the link to samya on the rolls uh product announcements so i appreciate brian for adding this i probably should have added it but i had two questions about that one one is over what time frame are we looking at so uh so in theory this is this could be the same as the gitlab 14 launch where we're saying basically since 13. 0 what has you know what kind of big improvements have we made um candidly this is always a little bit tough and i'm and i'm i'm not totally sure of all of the kind of the interplay here but i think i think this is kind of the general gist of this assignment is okay we have commit coming up we have some amount of like we have a stage uh you know a metaphorical stage to say something to the world and we'll get some amount of press attention because we're having an event right what kind of announcements do we make at gitlab it's really really tough to make product announcements because our entire roadmap is completely public yada yada yada so the thought here is to but also because our entire roadmap is completely public and because we ship these tiny little nbc's a a new feature will come out but it'll be not really usable right so it takes a while so if you look back over the past year and say okay like what started in the last year but now is really like a full-fledged feature what would what would be coming out of beta right like if we were any other company when we started a beta program in this last year what would we be announcing is ga at commit that's kind of that's kind of my thought on it did i see a couple head nods what do you think cindy yeah i think i was inclined to group some things to say like vulnerability management because there were tiny little mvcs all the way along but if you look at over the course of the year we went from this to this it makes more sense to me to highlight that than in any individual little thing and then the other point was we just had 14. 0 can we just can we reuse some of those things and plug them in here absolutely yeah yeah and vulnerability management was was one of the you know the features out of we looked at 14.

00 so i think yeah this is like let's take the stuff from 14. 00 and then maybe add a few more so that we can hit kind of different areas of press or give give our pr team this is kind of like input into our pr team to give them fodder to go out with and are we trying to hit three per stage i yeah ideally there's just you know three you know uh three items per stage and then i think y'all made some good notes that okay we need to add manage so i see manage in here that's excellent um and uh integrations we don't well actually we have some pretty exciting integrations so we have the jira stuff is pretty good there's a couple of things in uh integrations with vs code that could be notable but i can i show what i did for scm just to get some general feedback on it and if someone hasn't done it maybe that will also okay i was going cindy's direction here which was uh thinking you know a lot of and then i called them key iterations the sort of specific things so i listed a few specific things like three or four per each as key iterations but i called them something overall so we would have like one thing to call them there are several key iterations aligned with getaway cluster uh several that roll up to a research-based user experience and i was thinking like i was shy on calling out ux as as a bucket except that actually that's that's super typical right like windows 11 or anybody who's rolling stuff out they almost always have ux as one of their three things and then they mention a laundry list of stuff that aligns to that um so i i you know forgave myself for doing something at first i was kind of like shy about calling out ux and bucketing some things there but actually when i looked around that's pretty much how everybody does a big launch and in terms of the excitement level that also like i went in thinking this is just a two i guess part of it is like i feel like we're almost fixing something that's broken and that's not something you want to shout from the rooftops about but actually some of that stuff's really cool so i gave it a three excitement level i wasn't sure exactly where to place things um but i figured i wouldn't like to cindy's comment have something that's a one here anyway but i the only way i could make sense of like the iterations was to to bucket them with something and uh so that's kind of how i came down on it i don't know what everyone thinks about that i like that i've done a similar i've taken a similar approach for monitor um with incident management there were a bunch of things that we released um although the core of incident management was part of trial. x i think so um i did the same over there as well yeah i think that makes sense yeah and that that would help me with the planned stuff as well because there are some things like epic boards that people have been asking for for years now and they finally have and that's great but i think you know like the the milestone burn up charts that that was a two and that's that's helpful and i was looking through features and you know actual monthly features that were released in a given month i mean that was one of the more important ones but it's not very exciting but we can bundle that with some other things and and up level it so that that would be helpful there and also brian about the vs code thing one other cool thing about that is both of those vs code integrations that hit the same month were community contributions which is also kind of cool is is that is do we have vs code listed on here i didn't add it but i can i can add that in i've got good notes on that the extension that had been around for a while became official was kind of one of the things but there's some other stuff that's a little juicier than that and that i think that's a that's a pretty good note as well um we did that with like our our terraform module right there was like a community module but now it's officially supported so that's that's the you know that can be the line yes or no whether you can use the thing uh for a lot of businesses so i think that's a good one too how are we measuring excitement levels one two and three is there i was i was looking at um maybe mau as a metric to perhaps measure whether customers have started using that are interested in using that or not we probably may not have it for everything but at least some of it wherever we have it is it's probably something we can we can use yeah but we of course we need a benchmark level of what mau we want to call one two or three i i think it's a little it's a little bit of a judgment call like um you know for example cormac was saying uh like epic boards is something that was asked for for a long time now depending on how it's asked for maybe that means it's exciting or it's not right um but usually when something gets a lot of upvotes or when there's a lot of demand for it then i would i would bump the excitement level on something like that um certainly if something and a lot of people are using it the mau that's a that's another good measure i don't know that any one of those needs to kind of be exclusive i think it's a bit of a it's a bit of an individual judgment call and just like what is what is your feeling based on you know could be anecdotal like you talk to customers and they're like really hyper excited about this or you know maybe not which is which is okay i think it's okay um harsh responded to my comment about why we have the low excitement once and just said something about having him sort of stack ranked yeah i might i might even constrain this is we're not going to highlight log segments but we want to see the full spectrum especially in the case we have slim pickings alternately uh if there are double digit entries then we can stack rank um so that's that's kind of also helpful there so if if we have three for all of these that i mean it looks like we're going to get there and that's going to be quite a lot of features so um i might constrain it like this maybe you can only give out one one two or three and and treat it as a stack rank rather than just like a raw excitement level that doesn't necessarily hard somebody's one or somebody's three may be more important than somebody else's one depending and i had um i started by just looking at what was considered a key feature over the past year uh from from create and you know there are at least a dozen things that i'm not mentioning uh that could be on the list like i could give you ten things instead of three yeah give it give this just like the rough like pass and um like a lot of things recently i've been moving between docs and spreadsheets and the spreadsheet to docs uh this you know this might this might end up or some iteration of this might end up in a spreadsheet where we then try to stack rank in pr is like okay out of all of like the you know there's maybe 10 boxes here in three each out of the 30 items which are the top five um actually let's just let's actually just do that let's just do this like top top five overall this one is a pr driven to some degree what about like the noob and christie's uh product keynote at commit are we tailing this with that so so this is exactly where this is headed to um is the idea that um during the product keynote and then ideally during sid's keynote as well that there's some level of like an announcement that we make that then the press cares about that announcement um again really tough to do at gitlab because it's all been around for a while so this is this is our attempt to head to that area is to say like these are the announcements of the event and yeah maybe it's some things that have been around for a while but like now they're at a level of maturity now you know there's there's reason to be excited about this so that's kind of where it's coming from so i put uh a top five overall maybe we can just uh you know we should reserve a spot for plan but i'm gonna have to go through and do some aggregating after this just go through the list of what's shipped in the last 12 months and re-bucket that so uh maybe we can do like a five minutes kind of like um just just time boxing uh kind of look at these here what do what do you all think is uh top would be a top five out of the list of you know 20 or 30.

i would say if ux does end up being a flag that we fly that's an easy one because there's more than just maps to the create stage that would be considered ux improvement okay what else we need to have a security one in there we could have either vulnerability management or um i was what i've been struggling with a little bit is i'd like to kind of group the um some of this the proprietary scanning um without making it sound like they're scanning improvements because that sounds like they weren't good before yeah i let's let's go with vulnerability management for now i i and i would agree on that one and i would say that um some of these we did do some press around and the the fuzzing acquisitions was one thing so we might not get that kind of old i was i mean we did the fuzzing acquisitions a long time ago was it within the past year or longer i thought it was within the past year i think it was in the last little over six months or so it was last summer right or something around there it was like last spring or summer and then we did another set of press around the integration of it because the pr team liked all the i mean we got a lot of attention on the acquisition so they had me do a follow-up um on the integration i just feel like it's kind of worn out now but right that's what i was saying is that the the fuzzing we already did press on so we probably will not get another chomp at that so i think let's go with vulnerability management unreviewed but we also have in terms of proprietary stuff we've also got we replaced one of our scanners with semgrip and we did um we have our own proprietary dast scanner now that's in it's in beta called browser so it's our answer to scanning single page applications which represent a unique challenge i think i mean if i could have two it would be vulnerability management and berserker probably okay some grip could get picked up as a online item and a couple of the pieces about getback 14. [Music] which between between the the proprietary ships and the vulnerability management which would you pick as number one out of those two probably vulnerability management okay i'm just kind of scanning the list i would probably say like kubernetes agent is something that we've made a lot of investment in although i think the communities agent and from an integration point of view uh perhaps the terraform integration i think we have a lot of customers actually using that already so i'm gonna agree i'm just gonna call those get ops and i'm gonna put like ks agent plus hashi corp integrations it's like a bucket of capabilities that is probably worth talking about uh cool well let's you know let's try to uh this is due tuesday i think we want to try to get this done um so maybe just uh review this kind of like let's just kind of pick top five maybe something from planning something from ci cd uh yeah pipeline editor is definitely an option for ci cd um yeah there might be no sorry there might be a value stream analytics story in there too um if we aggregate at all it's it's a bummer that customizable value stream analytics is 12.