GitLab Workspaces: Competitive Analysis
Problem to solve
Opportunity Canvas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19E2EBnIJowyi2Es6AZTBMONWEYqqaREbDUPUyrwyNJw/edit#
Handy links
- Competitive analysis: https://medium.com/user-research/competitive-analysis-b02daf26a96e
- Product development flow: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product-development-flow/
Competitors
- Jetbrains: https://www.jetbrains.com/space/
- GitHub: https://github.blog/2010-06-29-introducing-organizations/
- Asana: https://asana.com/guide/help/workspaces/basics
- JIRA: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver/setting-up-your-workspace-938845051.html
- Azure DevOps: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/accounts/create-organization?view=azure-devops
Problem/JTBD
GitLab customers don't currently have a way to create users, have or assign admin permissions or operate as an autonomous instance on GitLab.com. The current infrastructure, without Workspaces, is confining and limits the flexibility customers need to manage their groups and teams.
The lack of Workspaces creates a barrier between self-managed and GitLab.com implementations that forces a trade-off decision for customers and generally reduces value for GitLab.com customers until feature parity is obtained for self-managed features.
GitLab.com is also not a fully secure solution for subscribed customers. We should ensure that customers have total privacy and zero risk of data leaking into other groups.
What questions are you trying to answer?
- How are our competitors solving this problem?
Specifically:
- How do our competitors currently fill the gap between a self-managed system administrator and a gitlab.com group owner? For example:
- How does an Asana Administrator compare to a GitLab Self-Managed system administrator?
- How does an Asana Administrator compare to a GitLab group owner?
- etc. for other competitors
- Look at our own system administrator role: what admin functions should we also allow Workspace admins to do?
Some first thoughts:
- Workspace admins should be able to create and manage users, including deciding what fields they can edit on their profile.
- Workspace admins should have a more granular API, but likely not the full admin API. (API docs)
- Workspace admins should be able to automate tasks (probably a later iteration...)
Some more thoughts:
- Should we allow Workspace admins to designate a billing manager in a later iteration, like Asana?
- ...
- .....
WIP Documentation
Others to consider: Box.com, Dropbox, IBM (product TBD)