Expansion Journey: Premium to Ultimate Up-tier
Epic for understanding how our largest customers expand into Ultimate
Customer Experience Journey Research
Understanding the current customer experience, identifying opportunities where we can improve, and leveraging metrics to advocate key experience improvement initiatives.
Customer Experience Journey Research
Understanding the current customer experience, identifying opportunities where we can improve, and leveraging metrics to advocate key experience improvement initiatives.
About Customer Experience (CX) Journey Research
Customer Experience (CX) research takes three perspectives into account:
- Customer Lens: Understanding the customer’s key activities along our core customer journey, their needs, who on their side is engaged in purchase decisions, through to onboarding and adoption, and the needs and expectations of GitLab for success.
- GitLab Teams: Understanding the experience of the GitLab team collaborating as a team in service of helping customers move through their purchasing and adoption journey with us, and where there are areas of friction inhibiting us from providing our best service to customers.
- Customer + Gitlab Intersection: This intersection captures the customer experience through the engagement model between their teams and ours to realize value in their investment with us.
Where’s Product/UX in this? Our in-product experience absolutely impacts our customer experience in a very real way. The focus of this team is centered on the engagement
Objective
Map our customer’s journey and experience evaluating, purchasing, and adopting GitLab in partnership with our customer-facing teams to identify opportunities to accelerate value. We seek to understand this across our core customer journey phases: Awareness, Evaluation, Purchase, Onboarding, Adoption, and Expansion across all customer segments and regions.
Key Results
- Improved customer experience
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Faster value realization for our customers
The Research
This year, the research conducted by this team will focus on building Foundational Maps**:** from aligning the many journey stages across the business into a unified journey view, mapping the current state end-to-end journey, a visionary future state map for what good looks like, and a single pane dashboard connecting the pre- to -post sales metrics for these journeys to establish the baseline for future experience measures.
The phases below outline how we will get to these artifacts over the next year:
(Visual coming soon)
As Foundations maps are established, the team will shift to Iterative maps which may include deep dives into specific phases or pain points in the journey, specific verticals, and/or regions. We will continue to iterate on our foundational maps annually to demonstrate improvements made to the overall customer experience.
Scheduled Research Projects
| Project | Quarter | Objective | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|
| (In Progress) Understanding Premium to Ultimate Uptiers for Large, Self-Managed Customers | Q1-Q2 | What is the experience for our largest customers to consider Ultimate, what factors get in the way of purchase and adoption, and what are the core elements of successful adoption? This journey also factors in the highest touch engagement model GitLab currently has to offer | Completion of 10 contextual inquiry interviews with customers Current & future state journey maps List of recc’s to improve this experience |
| (Up Next) Mapping Mid-Market First Order Lands with Premium and Duo | Q2 | What is the experience like for medium-sized customers to evaluate and purchase GitLab with our scaled services and teams? This journey may or may not include high-touch elements, depending on customer needs. | Completion of 20 contextual inquiry interviews with customers Current & future state journey maps List of recc’s to improve this experience |
| (Backlog) Product-Led Growth | Q3 | What is the experience like for customers who never talk to a human at GitLab from evaluating and purchasing GitLab, to onboarding and ultimately adopting GitLab for their organization? | Completion of 20 contextual inquiry interviews with customers Current & future state journey maps List of recc’s to improve this experience |
| (Backlog) Multi-year Lands (Migration, Onboarding, Adoption) | Q4 | What is the experience like for customers who purchase our Ultimate tier as a first-time customer, and also must migrate data, manage two tools concurrently, fully onboard their team onto GitLab and adopt for business success? | Completion of 10 contextual inquiry interviews with customers Current & future state journey maps List of recc’s to improve this experience |
Get in touch!
We are always seeking to talk to customers like you. While this team can’t help with technical support, billing or licensing issues, we can influence how our field teams can improve upon partnering with you to better understand your needs and help you realize value faster through GitLab. Reach out at csfeedback@gitlab.com.
Last modified April 10, 2025: Sarah schuster main patch 1f8f -fixed table error (
ed78fbcd)
