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Jacqueline Porter

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

November 22 @ 9:00AM PST
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GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Product Strategy
Top Questions
How do you plan releases? What development methodology does your company follow?
Jacqueline Porter
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management • November 23
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 ......Read More
331 Views
1 request
Which stakeholders need to have buy-in for your product strategy, and how do you approach creating alignment?
Jacqueline Porter
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management • November 23
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 strateg......Read More
339 Views
1 request
How do I know if we have a product strategy problem or a go to market problem? Our product isn’t growing as fast as we’d like.
Jacqueline Porter
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management • November 23
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......Read More
332 Views
1 request
How do I protect our product strategy from sales pushback? Our sales team doesn’t focus, and is trying to make our product easy to sell to anyone, rather that our target market.
Jacqueline Porter
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management • November 23
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 th......Read More
330 Views
1 request
What role does market trends play in figuring out your product strategy?
Jacqueline Porter
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management • November 23
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 com......Read More
345 Views
1 request
As the market leader, how should we think about defense as it relates to product strategy?
Jacqueline Porter
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management • November 23
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 co......Read More
334 Views
1 request
How do you develop your product strategy skills?
Jacqueline Porter
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management • November 23
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 pers......Read More
332 Views
1 request