Shift from unused features to driving monthly active usage
Over the past few years the primary mission for R&D has been to rapidly establish GitLab as a single app for the entire DevOps lifecycle. This involved building out a lot of new features and functions, and a focus on breadth over depth. Along the way, we have built a productive R&D machine, with high MR rates and generally low cycle times. Our R&D engine is a significant competitive advantage for us, and we want to retain our focus on iteration, high MR rates, etc.
However, we see signals that we need to shift our focus to driving (paid) monthly active usage in each of our R&D groups, and move away from adding additional features which in many cases aren't used much. These signals include the following:
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Stages per user (SpU) has been very flat, hovering around 1.5, despite now offering ten stages to users: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/performance-indicators/#stages-per-user-spu. Given that adding a new stage triples paid conversion, moving this number higher is expected to have a positive impact on ARR for the company.
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Paid net promoter score (PNPS) was 21 in Q1 and 25 in Q2. While these numbers aren't terrible, they are well short of our goal of 40. The more promoters we have who love and value GitLab, the more they will convince their friends and colleagues of the same, and the more software we'll sell.
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System Usability Score (SUS) has declined for 6 quarters in a row, indicating that our rush to build out new feature-functionality is putting pressure on usability. The more discoverable and usable GitLab is, the better the customer experience will be, which will drive up NPS and stages per user.
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Free-to-paid conversion rate has dropped from .11 in February to .04 in July, indicating that an increasing number of customers are not seeing enough value in paid tiers to convert.
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Net retention has been trending down, indicating that in a tough economic environment customers aren't seeing enough value to expand at the previous rates. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16FdduYiy26CaAJ7AxXv-ZnH3n-mZWRHXVb5UqgAbsqc/edit#slide=id.g8d2f3f93cc_3_7
Shifting the mentality from adding features to driving (paid) monthly active usage is a major cultural change. For years we've celebrated release posts full of new feature additions, shipping fast MVC's in new categories, and breadth over depth. So it's perfectly understandable why PM's and R&D groups have been optimizing for adding features. In order to shift the focus and culture of R&D toward driving usage, we need to reward different behavior. Going forward, look for us to celebrate the following:
- Getting your GMAU metrics in place asap
- Using your GMAU metrics to set your priorities
- Driving GMAU growth rates in excess of company growth rates
- Release posts full of discoverability, usability, and performance improvements
We are already on this journey, with our xMAU metrics now defined, Q2 and Q3 OKR's dedicated to getting xMAU metrics in place, and more funding for telemetry and data engineering groups. Getting the Product org to the point where we have accurate product metrics and are basing our priority decisions and funding decisions on usage data is my #1
priority, so please let me know if there are additional things we could be doing to make this shift happen sooner. We also adjusted the global prioritization list to make it clear that UX improvements are more important than new features: www-gitlab-com!59644 (diffs, comment 395856931)
Because this is an important mindset shift, I want to make sure every person in Product understands what we're doing and why. Please check the box to indicate you've read and understood this message.
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