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AMA: GitLab Group Manager, Product Management, Melissa Ushakov on Developer Product Management
November 22 @ 10:00AM PST
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GitLab Group Manager, Product Management, Melissa Ushakov on Developer Product Management
Top Questions
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
* Soft skill: Great product managers can seamlessly adjust their communication to match their audience. As a product manager, you'll speak with people in different roles and varying levels of expertise in your subject area. It is essential that you can communicate your ideas and exchang......Read More
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Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
I've always been drawn to tools that help teams collaborate. I love the feeling of knowing that I made a team's day-to-day work easier, more enjoyable and gave them more time to spend building great products. In almost all my jobs, I became an admin for our DevOps tools, spent time working with t......Read More
1075 Views
2 requests
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
As a Product Manager, you need deep knowledge of the personas you serve. To build great products for developers, you don't need to be a developer, but you need to understand their challenges, motivations, and day-to-day work. I encourage product managers to use the products they build so that the......Read More
1160 Views
3 requests
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
I'm a Group Manager of Product at GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/product/product-management-leadership/#group-manager-product-gmp. I am a manager for the Product Managers for the Plan stage at GitLab. Each product manager on my team has engineering, UX, and quality counterparts that......Read More
1215 Views
2 requests
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
Developers on the team will generally have a sense of the market since the products we build target them as a persona, especially if you're dogfooding your product. It's important to validate problems and solutions with customers to ensure that we're building a product that aligns with market nee......Read More
1176 Views
2 requests
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
One common mistake I have seen is having a monetization model that does not scale. Services and customization on top of open-source software will only scale as much as your workforce can. Having paid features on top of open source software and a tie ring philosophy that can be easily explained is......Read More
1139 Views
1 request
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
There are three key aspects of this: * Consistency - In large companies, APIs are maintained by many teams. Ensuring consistency across endpoints is essential to a great end-user experience. It's hard for when users when switching endpoints changes the format of standard fields like ti......Read More
1108 Views
1 request
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 23
I think that the whole team should strive to build a product that end users love. I love when there's passion on the team and ideas about what to build. When you are building a product for a persona that is close to you, it's important to gather data from end users to ensure that you have a compl......Read More
1115 Views
1 request