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Melissa Ushakov
Group Manager, Product Management, GitLab
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Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
* 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
1139 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
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
939 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
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
913 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
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
882 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
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
862 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
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
854 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
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
847 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • November 22
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
825 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • March 7
Contributing myself and supporting my team can be at odds with each other. Coaching and supporting my team is always my number one priority. There are times when I simply need to say no and deprioritize things to ensure I have enough time to support my team. It's important to have open commun......Read More
771 Views
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • March 6
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 ......Read More
712 Views
Credentials & Highlights
Group Manager, Product Management at GitLab
Top Product Management Mentor List
Product Management AMA Contributor
Lives In Austin, Texas, United States
Knows About Product Management Skills, Developer Product Management, Platform Product Management,......more