Growth planning for 12.1

Overview and objectives

The Growth team is getting off the ground and learning how to fly. One of the biggest barriers to the team's future success is access to data; to be able to successfully experiment, the team needs to have the ability to measure impact on GitLab.com and self-managed, with consistent definitions across each.

12.1's objective is to solve this problem as the team gains momentum in July. Specifically:

• Improve our self-managed telemetry tool, usage ping, to improve how we measure SMAU. We need to improve from the overestimated approach we have now.
• Ensure that we have a solid A/B testing framework that we can use on both GitLab.com and self-managed.

When these goals have been achieved, the result should gain us:

• A consistent SMAU definition across self-managed and GitLab.com.
• Significantly more reliable self-managed SMAU data (no longer overestimated).
• An ability to A/B test new features on (at least) GitLab.com and analyze behavior between the cohorts after a period of time.

As a stretch goal, we should queue up an additional experiment for roll-out and analysis like soft e-mail confirmation.

Issues

For specific issues and prioritization, please see https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/boards/1158847.