Customer Feedback Digest (Co-Create Initiative)

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Why/What Does This Issue Do

In the Create Stage, we lead the GitLab Co-Create Initiative, a program designed to empower our customers with the support and resources to drive innovation collaboratively. Through this initiative, we work with Customers to achieve results, develop new features, enhance existing ones, or fixing bugs, fostering a partnership that benefits both parties.

This initiative also provides a great opportunity to connect GitLab Engineers with Customers' pain points and frustrations, encourage a more user-centric approach to engineering. By bridging the gap between our teams and customers, we can deepen our understanding of real-world use cases and continue to create solutions that meet user needs.

So far, the initiative has delivered impressive results, including 9 successful Co-Create sessions with customers worldwide and 45 Community Contributions. While we've seen a significant positive impact, there's room to enhance knowledge sharing within GitLab to highlight the insights gained during these sessions and better communicate their value to our Customers.

This issue aims to brainstorm ways to:

  1. Clearly explain the Co-Create program.
  2. Increase visibility of its benefit and impact within and beyond the Create Stage.

IDEAS:

  1. Internal Documentation: Create a standardized issue template which can be used to capture and summarize key insights, lessons learned, and actionable improvements from customer interactions.
    • This template can highlight how Customers use GitLab features (both as intended and in unexpected ways), providing valuable input to guide product roadmaps and future iterations.
  2. Customer Empathy Lunch and Learns or Demos: Organise informal sessions led by participating Engineer where other Engineers can gain a better understanding of a Customer's workflow.
    • These sessions can focus on on how GitLab's products and features fits into the Customers' daily operations, helping us to identify areas for improvement and/or innovation.
  3. Post-Meeting Reports: Share concise, structured reports summarizing the meeting outcomes, such as feedback themes, challenges, success stories and actionable next steps, etc.
    • These reports can be shared internally via Slack, to drive transparency and collaboration across teams.
  4. Align Feedback with Metrics: This could include using Customer feedback to prioritize or validate issues already tracked in engineering sprints.
  5. Updating the Co-Create Initiative Documentation: to explicitly include the benefits of the initiative to Engineers, teams and GitLab as a whole.
    • Highlighting outcomes like improved product focus, team motivation, and stronger Customer relationships can help raise awareness of the initiative and secure broader buy-in.

Note: Customer meetings often involve confidential information, and it’s crucial to maintain trust and ensure that when sharing insights, we keep things SAFE, i.e. using confidential issues, redacting/removing sensitive information, etc..

Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖