GitLab Vision
Vision
Our vision captures what we want to deliver to customers in the next 10 years.
Our current vision is available to GitLab team members in the internal handbook.
The remainder of this page includes details about GitLab’s approach to long-term planning.
Cadence
Our Mission is on a 30-year cadence. It is the inspiration for this company vision, which is on a 10-year cadence.
The vision here is reflected in our company strategy, which is on a 3-year cadence. You can find additional product vision details on our direction page.
Monitoring an evolving market
While we define our mission, vision, and strategy, we also acknowledge that we need to adapt with a changing market to meet customer needs. Netflix is a great example of this. Everyone knew that video on demand was the future. Netflix, however, started shipping DVDs over mail. They knew that it would get them a database of content that people would want to watch on demand. In other words, timing is everything.
Additionally, we must ensure that our Platform is open. If a new, better version control technology enters the market, we will need to integrate it into our platform, as it is one component in an integrated DevSecOps product.
Entering new markets
GitLab has taken existing, fragmented software tooling markets, and by offering a consolidated offering instead, have created a new blue ocean. We would like to find more markets where we can repeat this same model.
The desirable characteristics of such markets fall into two stages: category consolidation and creation.
Category Consolidation
- A set of customer needs that are currently served by multiple, independent software tools.
- Those tools may already integrate with each other or have the possibility of integration.
- Those tools operate in categories that are typically considered discrete (for example, with GitLab, SCM was one market and CI was another).
- There is no current ‘winner’ at consolidating this market, even if there are some attempts to combine some of the tool categories within said market.
- Users of the product are able to contribute to it — for example, with GitLab, many users are software developers who can directly contribute code back to the product itself.
- When initially combined, the categories form a consistent and desirable user flow, which solves an overriding customer requirement.
- We can offer a consolidated toolchain that is more cost effective for customers than purchasing, running, and integrating each tool separately.
- We can do so profitably for the company.
Category Creation
- By combining categories, a new overriding category, or market, gets created: the consolidated toolchain.
- The sum of the categories combined should have desirable CAGR, such that entering the market means entering on a growth curve.
- Not all of the individual categories need to be on the upward curve of the technology adoption lifecycle (TAL). It is, however, necessary that there are enough future categories with high CAGR that are early in their adoption lifecycle.
- The ideal overlap of the TALs is that the peaks of the curves are as close to each other as possible, so that when one TAL moves to Late Majority, the next TAL is still curving upwards. This allows it to provide an organic growth opportunity for the company in the markets it is entering.
Our goal is to develop this model to be more quantifiable and formulaic, so that we can quickly and easily assess new opportunities.
Mitigating Concerns
We acknowledge the concerns to achieving our goals. We document them in our Mitigating Concerns page.
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