 Thank you for joining our sales enablement today. We have a Yob as our host today And he's going to talk through how to provide Any product updates that you that are requested from your customers and our prospects Related to any of the the nine stages. So Yob, I'm gonna let you take that away and proceed with your content Thanks, Tina Hey, everyone. This is the first time I do one of these so I do a bad job Give me that feedback and I'll do better next time So I wanted to mainly focus on one particular thing which is given a feedback to product. So at GitLab product is Who schedules or prioritizes things? So whatever we were building in a product? It's decided by products and it's a small group of people. It's me It's Mark and the individual product managers for each DevOps stage. We are about nine or so in total If there's anything you want changed or one of the customers speak to or potential customer That has to somehow go through product now we get Thousands of pieces of feedback a day. So we created particular processes to streamline this But first and foremost, I must say that Sharing feedback is the most important thing you you can do. So no matter what you take from today If you forget about all of it, you forget where it's all neatly written down because it is Then still share it like shared in some way or another like the most important thing is is that if you have feedback to share You share it and you share it as quickly as possible. So without further ado, I'm gonna share my screen To talk you through how I would like feedback to be shared ideally share All right So this is rather easy to find it's in our website handbook slash product and it's on a very top of the page And there's two sections here. How do I share feedback and a customer expressed interest in a feature now? I'm not gonna read through this. I'm just gonna give you the the overview of it What we would like is that if a customer or a prospect shares feedback you share that ideally in the place where it's most The single source of truth so that means that Usually this is the issue for a particular feature or particular change And we see this happening today and I will I have some bad examples to show you today of what I prefer to see improved So I'm not very good example that I see very often is is one of these and I don't want to call out anyone in particular I know this is a comment by rap But this is what I see everyone doing is that it says we have customers who are interested with a link to Salesforce now Let me remind you this is better than nothing So I highly vastly prefer this over anything else But there's a problem with this and that is that it doesn't give us any additional information Sometimes the issue that is reported on doesn't match exactly with a request by the customer But it also doesn't give us any further information And if it's just one link sometimes it's not a big deal and a product manager might go in and see like what is actually Behind this request or what is actually this customer asking for but in general this that is not something that scales And it's also makes it very hard to you know consider that when you scroll through an issue that we haven't scheduled yet Which is actually the case with this one. It's in the backlog You know, we look at this and we're like, you know, I don't know if this is important So you might be thinking okay, what else can I do? So I have another example which is still not good enough although I'll be slightly better In this case one by Jim where Jim says well, we have a very large prospect that requires this to replace other tools This gives us a little bit more information. It's a very big customer That's something that we take into consideration when we're prioritizing things the product, right? If a very big customer wants something That's we give that additional weight over if it's only a single small customer that wants them So that makes a lot of sense But if you read this for a product manager, there's a few problems with this It doesn't distinguish between whether a customer said, yeah, I would like that and I will not buy GitLab unless I have this and Those two things are very far apart Yet we are faced that product every single day with having to distinguish between those two because there is literally 30,000 issues in our backlog. So and most customers are like, yeah, I would like all of those So we could add and the comment like that to every single issue like oh this customer also wants this But it makes it very hard for us to prioritize and what happens is that? we tend to give less weight to these kind of comments because If there's not the information that we need there, we don't know how important it is So, you know, we might not prioritize it sufficiently even though this might be you know This very large prospect might say well if you add this feature to GitLab, I will move our entire enterprise over to ultimate so We need some more Some detail so what I did in the product handbook is I wrote down what we would like to see So linking to the source. So usually a Zendesk link or some that Salesforce link or sometimes Zendesk link It's the first good one, but the second one is probably the most important one and that is to provide context If you can include why someone might be interested in a particular feature in a particular change It usually helps to just ask this right the moment someone gives you feedback to just send them. Why like why do you want this? and What the customers might not directly tell you but what you almost certainly know is that the context of the request like they are Already used the GitLab use or they are not yet or they evaluating us or they are comparing us with another product or you know They're looking to replace something else And then lastly and this is goes back to what I told you in the very beginning It's always worthwhile to mention the product manager and ask them anything that isn't clear to you What we've got over the past few months. We did like a survey. We did a bunch of session with sales where We discussed like how do you feel the interaction between product and sales and the feedback? We got is that it's not great, but what we also took from that was that it seems Not completely clear how product works a product manager should be able to answer you any question You might have so if it's not clear from you what the status is from an issue right in theory It should be but sometimes isn't if it's not clear to you when we're shipping something whether something you can always ask that and if you do that at the same time You share some feedback then one the product manager will immediately become aware of your comment and adding this and second It gives you an opportunity to get the issue updated Actually get an issue about this what usually happens to that if this actually a very big deal for you or for your customer The product manager will come in contact with you and schedule a call with this customer or just walk over whatever you shared Now There are some cases where a customer says I want to integrate with X That doesn't mean anything to us Integrating between two products. Get lab is massive as you know a very powerful, but there's other products That are very big. So just saying integrating with something doesn't mean enough for us And we get this request a lot and I and it is a little bit frustrating to us too For everything one of these comments go in and say, okay, but what do you expect out of this integration? So I provided some guideline about that So to make all of this easier. I just made Template here. We don't have quick feedback in comments I think it lab but it's something we'll do in the future But what you could do is you could just copy paste this and then you have the fields that you would need to always provide Great feedback. So you could simply copy paste this and make sure to fill everything out. So a link to For instance salesforce Why is this customer prospect interested in something? What are they currently having as a solution for this, right? This is important for us to know for instance, we want to You know, we want to compete with certain products like Jira Like if they're using Jira for this now and they say, well, this is you know, we use Jira for this now But if you were to use do this in GitLab, we could replace Jira. That's a big data point for us, right? That's very important person. Okay. This is why we should do this and then and this is what I discussed earlier How important is it actually to discuss them are like is this something like if we don't have this We can't use GitLab or is it some is it's a nice to have because as I said before Almost everything is nice to have in our backlog. So, you know, it's and that's okay and that that that feedback is still valuable to us, but It's this is an important data point as well And then if there's any questions either be that from you or from the customer, right? If you don't know what the status is over, you don't understand something about it or you know, it's just not clear How this would work? Ask it Maybe the customer has a similar kind of question and then lastly if you haven't already you can Mention a particular product manager. Now you might say Wait, there was a good comment by Mark Bell shoot the template includes some indication of the size of the opportunity Yes, Mark, that's that's a great point. I should have added that here Yes, I would very much appreciate that if someone could take a note and I'll make a merge request directly after this call Or I'll do it during the Q&A. So You might say well Who do I contact? I have no idea which product manager to contact Well, again, as we're just giving feedback any product manager is fine, right? If you really don't know and if you really can't find it, it would have been fine to mention any of them Even if it's just me every time but I much refer you to actually go to this section Which is appropriately named which product manager to that contact. There's a link there to the product categories and Here you can quickly find For each stage Manage product manager Jeremy plan Victor and if you don't know maybe a particular feature like issues and you search for issue You click through and there you go issues this is part of plan and therefore the product manager to to contact is Victor And that's all there is to it. And if you're wondering like what is a similar kind of a Kelly's ass or a PM bot. That's that's not a not a bad idea. What is What is a good example? I searched for a while I couldn't find like great examples because this template is new most of this content was already in product handbook, but I moved it up But actually there is a customer here that explained That did most of these things where they say look we're looking for a new solution to all of this We now use track instead of get lab. This is what we use a track And that's why we want to have this particular feature in this case custom fields and get lab Bloody blah blah blah. We would use it like this And it's very important for us. Otherwise, we can't use get lab for this and we're now setting up Jira instead So this is almost a perfect example of how it would work someone that says this is what we're using now This is our use case Etc. And here this customer even mentions I wouldn't care if this were added to enterprise edition because we are looking for a hosted solution So that's that's very interesting But in general if you share something from a customer product will Have a suggestion about which tier or something will go into So that is all I wanted to share and I see that there's already some questions in the comments Excellent. Yeah. Thank you very much for the content John can you stop recording and we'll open it up for the rest of the discussions and You'll be you can answer the one soon here. Tell me if we're recording. All right, we are all right So I'm showing right now How do you actually know where to post your feedback like a customer says I am interested in X How do you actually find an issue for X and whether it exists? So there was already a suggestion Which is just by using search There's two good ways to search the first one is to use Google So you can just type whatever key words you have in Google and then site get lab calm And maybe even the group It's it's up to you how to do it. What you can also do is you can and let me just focus my thing Could go to get love.com. You can go directly to the top level group of good lab org So you don't have to think about Get labs II good lab EE you can go through top level group and you can search either even in epics or in the issues Usually if you go through the issues, you will find something So if you want something with custom fields, you could type custom fields and in this case, I get a 500 which is there That's the nature of giving in them But my I think the quickest way usually is to go from top-down thinking which is a customer says I want X You can probably be a reason Where in a product that would fall in which of the categories or each of the DevOps stages? It's false and to see if we're planning something on the short term or if it's something within our radar It's usually a good idea to look through the direction page and specifically the direction page for individual stages So if you go to the direction page, you could just search here, right? You could just command f and you could search through the page You can also look at the product vision for individual DevOps stages So each DevOps stage has its own vision page and on that vision page We have more detailed information about what are the kind of things that we're looking to ship So for instance if a customer says, oh, I want you know a deeper integration with Jira you could see here. Oh Jira integration and then and then the links to epics in this case And if you drill down there, you'll find issues or maybe even this epic to just comment on It's a general point Whatever you find is that somehow links to your request just leave that kind of feedback If you mention the product manager, they will make sure that if it's not in the right place, it is moved to the right place Yes, there are a lot of issues and yes, it can be very hard to find the right one So just make sure it lands somewhere and in doubt you just create a new issue. That's okay And if you want to choose between CE and EE I would generally recommend to put it in EE because Customers requesting something is more likely that we're gonna add it to The EE tracker, but it doesn't really matter because if it has to be there, we are happy to move it as well. So Search for it. Try the top-down approach to go through the direction page But if you can't find anything just create an issue yourself or share it directly with the product manager. Either way is fine