Melissa Ushakov

One question I love to ask is: "Tell me about a time when a conversation with a customer made you realize that your product direction was wrong." I have heard so many great stories about dispelling assumptions by talking to customers. One of my favorite stories was when a PM did generative research about the biggest problems their users faced with their product. They found that the feature that they were planning to spend the greater part of their upcoming capacity on was not mentioned at all! W ...Read More

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 exchange information with everyone! I really love the perspective shared by Camilla Boyer in a recent talk at GitLab about communicating with emotional intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pZoNORrDjU. Product mana ...Read More

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 they work with to build their products. I also have leadership counterparts in Design, UX, and Quality. We all work together to steer the direction of a collection of teams. You can see all the details ...Read More

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 complete picture of their needs.  This generally comes in two forms: Problem Validation: Identifying your end users' pain points. This can also be confirming of a problem hypothesis. https://about.gitlab.com/ ...Read More

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 needs, not just our own. I go into how to do that in another one of my answers.  Product Managers on the team will build a complete picture of product priorities by talking to a diverse set of end users and ...Read More

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 timestamps and other audit fields. The first step is to have agreed-upon technology and conventions. Then you can start enforcing the standards during code reviews and with your automated tests.  Documentation - Comple ...Read More

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 esssential. A tiering strategy for features based on buyers has worked well for GitLab. The free tier targets individual contributors, and other levels target enterprises. You can read more about it her ...Read More

Working at GitLab for the last three years has shown me that fully remote teams can work and be highly effective. Teams at GitLab are remote and highly distributed and work asynchronously first. For example, we run all the typical agile ceremonies (refinement, spring planning, sprint retrospective, standups, etc.) asynchronously. This way of working provides a high degree of documentation for all decisions, allows for greater collaboration, and more thought to be put behind critical decisions.  ...Read More