AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Product Strategy

Releases can be separate from when the product is made available to customers. Some times, people think of product launches and software releases as needing to be tied together, but in order to maintain agile development and ensure market readinesss, it makes sense to time releases for when your customers will be ready to consume those resources. Typically, I think of planning product launches in these ways: 1. Customer market readiness - when does the customer need this feature for their workflow? 2. Monetization - is this feature a driver of revenue for my business? Upsell or licenses? Subscription? 3. Competitive landscape - are we going to be first to market? After looking at these dimensions, I will then plan with counterparts like marketing, engineering, and design to ensure we have the proper assets in place for proper releases. For GitLab's release process check out our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/deployments-and-releases/

This is a great question! Product strategy is only as good as those who believe in it and choose to follow it. First, product strategy is typically best when it is aligned with company and business mission/goals. So, I usually seek alignment from the executive group with my longer term strategy first. This is typically done by creating a pitch deck for my product strategy that follows a 5-6 slide format of: market pain point/user research, market size & serviceable market, competition, where we are going (long-term roadmap), and how we are going to get there (short term direction). I will incorporate any feedback into the deck from this audience first. Second, I will share this V2 strategy deck more locally with teams working on products and PMs and ask for their feedback. Specically asking for areas where I could add more relevance and then incorporate some of their findings and research into the strategy. Typically it helps to add their feedback to help get buy in. Third, I will share the V3 strategy deck with external to product and R&D stakeholders like the field teams. I will ask questions like "what is missing here" or "how hard or easy would this be to sell". At this point I would usually add a slide around "Monetization" or "Field enablement" to capture any narratives needed to support the field. These three steps really help build iterations along the way, but also foster a sense of inclusion and deep understanding of direction in the product strategy.

The question I usually ask back is "How much ARR or money is that market or target worth? The target I am building for is worth $XXM and if I slow down, we won't be able to deliver on that. If you think it might be worth changing directions we can definitely to some market validation to see if the business case is there." At that point, the sales team then understands that in the end the product has to be built for the future and we can not keep reacting to every shiny object syndrome. Sometimes I also like to compromise and find the features that may be scheduled later in the roadmap but appeal to wider audiences and say to the sales team "we can pull these features in earlier because these features would benefit your targets as well."

Product strategy is about knowing the domain well enough to be able to make bets about where it will go. You can develop this skillset a few ways by investing in sensing mechanisms that build your expertise across: 1. customer use cases and workflows 2. competitive landscape 3. analyst perspectives 4. market landscape 5. economic and buyer motivation 6. technology advancements and developments By researching and developing a deep understanding of the context around your product and how those parts move over time, you can gain awareness on how your area will grow over time. This will then inform your plans for how to develop the product in response to user needs, technology advancements, and economic pressures.

Market trends are what I would call a "sensing mechanism" in product strategy. These trends show you one set of behaviors in the general landscape of the product context that may shape how your product will need to react and behave. Your product is not just competing with like products, it is competing with all sorts of other technology and experiences for people's attention. As a result, as product technologists and practitioners, we must be intentional about the context in which the product lives - which is what a market trend signifies.

Product Market Fit (PMF) is elusive and attaining it can be a challenge for thousands of start-ups. In many cases, your growth might actually be a combination of strategy and go-to-market. The only way to truly know is to run some experimentation with A/B tests with various markets and targets as well as campaigns to validate if you are using the right GTM for the target market or have the product strategy. This is a nicely written article with some great visuals on PMF: https://theproductmanager.com/topics/how-to-find-product-market-fit/

Love this question! Market leaders often get very accustomed to singing their praises and forget to regularly reflect on themselves and their competition. I would advise you and your PMs to regularly assess your feature sets and do competitive walkthroughs of your capabilities against your top competition in the landscape. This will help you spot any potential up and comers in the space. From a strategic perspective, what got you where you are may not get you where you want to be. So, some critical thinking and UX research on next-generation experiences could be helpful for generating ideas to sustain the leadership in your domain!