Product Development Roles and Responsibilities

Successful product development requires and demands a unified commitment to shared outcomes across team members. The entire team must collectively embrace responsibility for the delivery of positive user impact, aligned to our GitLab value of delivering Results for Customers.

It’s a Team Effort

Responsibilities to Deliver High Quality Product

Quality is Everyone’s Responsibility

Role vs. Responsibility

There is an important distinction between a role (such as Product Manager, Engineering Manager) and a Lead’s responsibility area (such as Product, Technical, Delivery, Resource, UX). While roles such as ‘Product Manager’ and ‘Engineering Manager’ often align with specific leadership responsibilities, their areas of responsibility are not exclusive to their roles.

• Ex: while a team member with the ‘Product Manager’ role often fulfills the Product Lead responsibilities, they have other critical contributions beyond the demarcations of the Product Lead role. In some situations where a product is consumed internally and may not directly interface with end customers, the Product Lead role may be fulfilled by a Technical Individual Contributor (IC) or an Engineering Manager.
• Ex: a team member with an ‘Engineering Manager’ role often covers multiple responsibilities simultaneously - an Engineering Manager may fulfill some or all of the Technical Lead, Delivery Lead, and Resource Lead roles based upon the needs of their specific team.

With the caveats above, the general pattern we see within GitLab product development is:

• Product Division usually covers the responsibilities of:
  • Product Lead - note: there can be exceptions here, especially in the infrastructure area.
  • UX Lead
  • Documentation Lead
• Engineering Division usually covers the responsibilities of:
  • Technical Lead
  • Delivery Lead
  • Resource Lead

Within GitLab product development teams, we believe that “we win or lose as a team” - wins are team wins, and losses are team losses. The whole team owns the outcomes, and responsibilities assigned to a subset of the team are intended to drive execution excellence, and not meant to install rigid boundaries. One individual can cover multiple areas of responsibility on behalf of a team:

• Ex: Technical Lead may serve as the Delivery Lead
• Ex: Delivery Lead may also serve as Resource Lead for the team
• Ex: Technical Lead may serve as the Product Lead and Documentation Lead for technical excellence, reliability, scalability, or sustainability efforts.

Lastly, the specific needs that a product development team has for a specific responsibility may differ based upon the type of project, maturity of project, maturity of technology area and technology stack, maturity of developers, etc. The key is ensuring that each product development team has agreement and interlock on ownership and accountability for each of these responsibilities, regardless of how they are distributed among team members and across roles.

Who, What, Why, How, and When

For Product Development, we are leveraging the general-purpose questioning method of “who”, “what”, “why”, “how”, and “when” and asking these questions to better understand the outcomes we are aiming for the team. Each of us plays a role in answering these questions on a continuous basis to achieve delivering a world class product to our customers. In the figure below, we walk through an illustrative example of how Product Development team members contribute and collaborate in shaping a new product feature:

Our objective is to preserve each team’s freedom to leverage agile methods to develop and deliver customer value in our product, while introducing a synchronized planning process to ensure that we deliver with the predictability and quality that GitLab’s customers demand and deserve.

Key Events & Activities Mapping into Responsibilities

Hierarchy of Work

• Direction
  • Big Initiative
    • Top-level Epic
      • Capability
        • Composite Deliverables
          • Atomic Deliverables

Legend

• ✅: driving
• ✔️: involved

View page source - Edit this page - please contribute.