Sensing Mechanisms

What are sensing mechanisms?

Our ability to iterate quickly is a measure of our efficiency, but our effectiveness is just as critical. As a product manager you are critical to us not just working correctly, but working on the correct things. You do that by prioritizing appropriately. Your prioritization decisions will be enhanced if you maintain a sufficient understanding of the context in which you make them.

There is no limit to the amount of inputs you can utilize for making prioritization decisions. We’ve organized these mechanisms into three lists. One for those that primarily sense feedback from users, one that primarily senses feedback from buyers and another that senses internally generated feedback which could represent buyers or users. For new PMs consider these lists as guidance for places to ensure you are plugged in to maintain sufficient context.

In 2020, we conducted a GTM and R&D sensing mechanism survey to get an understanding of how team members valued the sensing mechanisms listed below. We calculated this value by multiplying their responses (1-5) for how efficient they felt a sensing mechanism was by how their responses (1-4) for how effective they felt the sensing mechanism was. We’ve ranked the below lists by the average value from all respondents.

Sensing Mechanisms by Type

User

1. Asking probing questions in customer discovery meetings
2. Engaging with our community alongside our Developer Relations team and triaging community generated issues and ideas
3. Reviewing top up voted issues
4. Engagement directly with customers and via the customer label
5. Requesting and analyzing results from UX research.
6. A summary of previous user interviews can be found under the User interview project
7. All UX Research is being transcribed in Dovetail

Buyer

1. Asking probing questions in sales support meetings
2. Reviewing Customer Success designated top issues
3. Reviewing the most requested issues from customers using the Customer Requested Issues (Product) dashboard and the Customer Issues Prioritization Framework handbook page for guidance.
4. Tracking open source projects in the same space as part of your competitive analysis is important as well. You can evaluate these open source options not just for interesting features and ideas, but potentially to integrate them in our product
5. Chorus transcriptions of sales calls and demos (how to video - private)
6. Reviewing Win/Loss reports
7. Learn about customer health data using Gainsight built on salesforce, managed by the Customer Success team
8. Attending QBRs and consuming QBR summaries/highlights
9. Speaking directly with users via PCSAT responder outreach

Market

1. Maintaining competitive and market assessments. Checkout this great video discussing competitive analysis for Product Managers at Product League with GitLab’s Orit Golowinski.
2. Monitoring and maintaining missing features in your category epics (competitive landscape section)
3. Monitoring and maintaining the direction page for the categories you own
4. Subscribing to your competitor’s blogs to be aware of what they are releasing will help you here
5. Reviewing relevant analyst reports
6. Consuming competitive and market content review highlights
7. Reviewing relevant analyst reports
8. Meeting with analysts to confirm direction and vision of section and stages
9. Paying regular attention to competitive wins and losses

Internal

1. Leadership OKRs set the direction for the company
2. Each PM should be having regular conversations with their stage groups stable counterparts to discuss their strategy and plan. Share this discussion with the company via our GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel. PMs should share their next three milestones, year-long plan, strategy, and relevant OKRs (with status) so everyone can contribute feedback.
3. Dialogue with internal customers to improve the dogfooding potential of your features
4. Quarterly cross-section direction reviews
5. Reviewing Performance Indicators for trend shifts and changes