Link to original video by GitLab Unfiltered

Product Marketing Meeting (weekly) 2021-06-28

Summary of "Product Marketing Meeting (weekly) 2021-06-28"

Short Summary:

This meeting focuses on product marketing efforts for GitLab, specifically discussing how to effectively communicate product announcements and improvements to the public. The team explores ways to identify key features and improvements that have been released over the past year, with a focus on those that are mature and ready for wider adoption. They aim to create a compelling narrative for these features, highlighting their value and impact. The meeting also touches on the development of competitive analysis sheets, emphasizing the need for accurate and honest comparisons with other DevOps tools. Finally, the team works on crafting concise and impactful messaging for GitLab's core value propositions, aiming to capture the essence of their offerings in a few punchy statements.

Detailed Summary:

1. Corporate Events Support:

• The team discusses the need for better coordination and support for corporate events, where GitLab participates.
• The current approach involves individual product marketing managers (PMMs) and their campaign managers taking ownership of events.
• The team aims to improve communication and ensure clear commitments from campaign managers for event support.
• Specific events mentioned include:
  • Platform on AWS re:Invent
  • CI/CD on Google Next
  • GitOps on KubeCon

2. Product Announcements for GitLab Commit:

• The team brainstorms product announcements for the upcoming GitLab Commit event.
• The goal is to identify features that have matured and are ready for wider adoption, even if they were initially released earlier.
• The team emphasizes the need to present these features in a way that resonates with the press and highlights their value.
• Vulnerability management, GitOps capabilities (Kubernetes agent and HashiCorp integrations), and features from GitLab 14.0 are considered as potential announcements.
• The team discusses using a "stack ranking" approach to prioritize features for announcement based on their impact and excitement level.

3. Competitive Analysis Sheets:

• The team reviews the competitive analysis sheets, focusing on the "Tier 1" competitors for each GitLab stage.
• The team clarifies that competitors should only be included on the sheets if they are relevant to the specific stage being analyzed.
• The team emphasizes the importance of presenting an honest and accurate assessment of the market, including GitLab's strengths and weaknesses.
• The team also discusses the need to provide clear descriptions of the value propositions for each GitLab stage, beyond simply listing the stage name.

4. Messaging Framework:

• The team reviews a messaging framework for GitLab, focusing on crafting concise and impactful statements for key value propositions.
• The team discusses the importance of using consistent tone and language across different statements.
• The team explores various options for messaging, including:
  • "Single source of truth, countless possibilities"
  • "End-to-end control over your software factory"
  • "More speed, less risk"
  • "Secure the software factory and its deliverables"
  • "Velocity with confidence"
• The team ultimately decides to go with "More speed, less risk" as the most impactful and concise statement.

Notable Quotes:

• "Our entire roadmap is completely public... so the thought here is to... say like these are the announcements of the event and yeah maybe it's some things that have been around for a while but like now they're at a level of maturity now you know there's there's reason to be excited about this."
• "The goal is to have a comparison comparing devops tools not a you know this is all of our competitors and why we're better."
• "I love how you're just like bam."
• "More speed, less risk, no trade-offs."
• "The engineer in me says there's never no trade-offs."