GitLab.com Discovery and Exploration
Background:
GitLab's hosted offering makes up a relatively small proportion of our overall revenue, and we'd like to grow this segment of our business. In order to do this, we'd like to understand the friction that users have with GitLab.com and how we can improve.
I'm particularly interested in gathering insights from paid users who have churned. I'm less interested in hearing from customers who are active and paying.
What questions are you trying to answer?
- Which areas of GitLab.com are areas of friction for new users?
- Why do paid users typically churn (either downgrade their plan, or leave GitLab.com altogether)?
Are you looking to verify an existing hypothesis or uncover new issues you should be exploring?
Exploratory
What is the backstory of this project and how does it impact the approach?
See above.
What do you already know about the areas you are exploring?
I've heard of 3 areas that've been barriers: security, stability, and authentication. The last, auth, feels like the most pressing for improvement. Based on word-of-mouth internally, this has made it a real challenge for larger organizations to consider GitLab.com (user management for thousands of internal users is just not feasible without some auth mechanism to help manage access).
I'd love to understand whether or not this is the only barrier we need to focus on, or if there are other user needs unique to our hosted offering that we need to consider.
What does success look like at the end of the project?
We've verified at least 3 areas of improvement. We can take these insights and confidently map out a series of small, iterative changes that progressively improve GitLab.com in these areas.