Product Marketing

Welcome to the GitLab Product Marketing Handbook

We develop insights, positioning, and messaging that communicate the value of our core platform and our vertical / horizontal solutions with a unified content strategy.

Our mission is to accelerate GitLab’s path to market by developing insights, positioning, and messaging that communicate the value of our platform and solutions.

• We are core to GitLab’s go-to-market process, operating at the intersection of product management, sales, customer success, and marketing.
• We help deliver a connected customer experience with every touchpoint reinforcing the brand, values, solutions, and vision of GitLab.
• We create programs and messaging to demonstrate momentum and trust in the market.

We make an impact to GitLab’s growth by influencing the market with GitLab’s differentiated value. Our responsibilities include:

1. Build and maintain GitLab’s messaging pyramid, which includes brand messaging (driving emotional value), company messaging (driving economic value), use-case messaging (driving functional value), and product messaging (driving technology value).

2. Translate GitLab’s message into marketing communications, customer / partner advocacy, and growth marketing. Maintain momentum with minor marketing launches to support monthly product releases, drive bi-annual major marketing launches to capture attention in the market, and support quarterly marketing campaigns that are designed to drive demand from the target customer profiles and segments.

3. Accelerate sales and reseller productivity in partnership with team enablement. Support sales-facing content and training sessions in translating GitLab’s message into accelerated sales velocity, across different sales stages.

Ask Product Marketing

All Product and Solution Marketing work is aligned to the overall company and marketing priorities. If you need more immediate attention please send a message with a link to the issue you created in the #ask-product-marketing slack channel.

Go-to-market (GTM) Strategies

We develop and champion go-to-market strategies that take into account our sales goals, product strengths/limitations, and marketing vehicles. These strategies include recommendations on product and solution areas upon which to focus our marketing and sales efforts and provide supporting messaging, positioning, personas, key assets/content, demos, sales enablement, and more. We deliver our stories/messages to customers, analysts, press through collateral, events, customer meetings, etc., where we get first-hand feedback from the audience to iterate and improve our strategies. We champion the customer perspective for continuity of experience across the various customer touchpoints.

Each team within Product Marketing contributes uniquely and equally toward GitLab’s comprehensive GTM priorities that includes:

• characteristics of accounts and personas to pursue with marketing and sales,
• routes to market (e.g. direct, channels),
• key messages,
• currated assets/content needed for the buyer’s journey,
• key questions for sales to ask, competitive positioning, overcoming objections, other sales resources
• influencing the influencers (press and analysts), responding to analyst RFIs for magic quadrants (MQs) and waves.

Subject Matter Expertise

Product marketers are core to GitLab’s go-to-market process, operating at the intersection of product management, sales, customer success, and marketing. Some examples of initiatives led by product marketing team include:

• They lead go to market across different channels working with many cross functional teams within marketing.
• They lead product launches collaborating with cross functional teams across product, campaigns, sales, and marketing.
• They lead pricing and packaging communications with cross functional teams across product, sales, PR, marketing, etc.
• They lead marketing launches monthly, quarterly, and bi-annual.
• They lead messaging and content for global events that GitLab participates or hosts.
• They lead messaging and content for sales enablement and accreditation.

Product Marketing and Sales Enablement

Through research and iteration, Product Marketing becomes the subject matter experts around key product capabilities and/or solutions. We provide the voice of the customer to help to connect the dots across the marketing functions (web, campaigns, digital ads, ABM, events) and sales stages (SDR nurture, SAEs/SAs pursuit/close, CSM expansion) by providing an outside-in perspective of our buyer’s journey experience, along with that of their key influencers, from pain to purchase and from interest to sales. We strive to optimize the journey to efficiently achieve return on marketing and sales investment.

Product Marketing team members serve as subject matter experts and conduct in-house and partner sales trainings scheduled by the Sales Training team and Partner Marketing. For info go to the Sales Enablement page.

Key timelines

1. Messaging pyramid: Published and updated quarterly, as part of GitLab’s operational cadence.

2. Marketing communications and campaigns: Weekly and monthly tracking in partnership with product management, marketing comms, and digital / field marketing teams.

3. Sales enablement: Weekly and quarterly tracking of content updates to sales enablement portal, weekly spotlight sessions, and quarterly training certifications.

Key metrics

1. Messaging effectiveness: Ratings received from e-group, PLT/MLT, sales leaders, industry analysts and influencers, reseller partners, and end customers.

2. Campaign performance: Growth metrics for specific campaigns, exposure of marketing comms activities, and demand captured from web and event activities supported.

3. Sales enablement impact: Participation, viewership and ratings of training materials and sessions completed.

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