GitLab’s CMO Ashley Kramer on The Importance of OS Communities (Workshop Wednesday)

Hello, welcome to our Workshop Wednesday. I see people are still joining, so again, we'll just give it a moment. All right. Welcome everyone. As you're joining, if you want to put in the chat where you are joining from, you are more than welcome to. We love to see where people are dialing in from. Alright, I think it's about time to get started. We'll keep letting people in, but thank you so much for joining, and hello, SaaStr community. Thanks for coming back to Workshop Wednesday. Every Wednesday at 10 AM Pacific, we will be here week after week to share detailed, interactive, and hands-on workshops. We'll bring along a SAS expert to walk us through content that they are an expert in, and then we'll have an interactive discussion. We can't wait to hear from you. You'll have the opportunity to interact with the speaker directly so you can get your questions answered, as well as interacting with the SAS community. So definitely utilize the chat function. This week, we will hear from Ashley Kramer, CMO and CSO at GitLab. We will be discussing the importance of OS communities. Again, we want these sessions to be as interactive as possible and make sure all of your questions are answered. Feel free to come off mute to ask the questions during our interactive discussion, or you can put them through the chat and I will help facilitate. So if you're comfortable, please turn on your video and let's make this an interactive session. All right. Now, time for the good part. Let's introduce Ashley. Ashley, welcome. Hi.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm so excited to have you here today. We're going to warm up with a few quick questions. So first off, what project are you working on today that you're most excited about? Hello, Ashley, are you able to hear me?

Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, can you, can you repeat that? Something glitched there.

Yeah, no problems at all. Virtual happens to the best of us.

I was trying to figure— I think I might have actually, um, turned my volume off. Sorry.

Yeah, no problem at all. What project are you working on today you're most excited about?

Yeah, so, um, we'll talk a little bit about, um, GitLab high level, but, um, it is— it's something we're working on at GitLab which is tying to my background. My background is in data and analytics. GitLab is in the DevSecOps space, and so we are developing, um, really, really powerful analytics about what's happening in that DevOps platform. So for me, it's kind of worlds colliding— background in analytics plus figuring out things like developer productivity, security via analytics in the new platform that I work on— is, is really, really exciting to me.

I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of questions about that in the chat. So thank you for sharing. Um, our next question: in the last 12 months, what's been the hardest thing you've worked on?

Yeah, so from my perspective, it's not really a thing, but as I just mentioned, I came from 10+ years in another space, and I came over to the DevOps space, the dev tooling space, the open source space. Space because of my massive interest in it. But the challenge there is that I was kind of an expert in the other space. And while I, I did grow up as a developer, um, by trade, and actually at a former company I even bought GitLab to help improve developer efficiency, it's— there's a lot of new things to learn. And so from my perspective, it, it's understanding this space And that's also really exciting to me because I love challenges.

I love that, making a challenge a positive. But I'm sure that's super relatable to a lot of our audience about career shifts, et cetera. What's your favorite SaaS product?

Oh, that's a tough one because I really, really just love so many of them, but obviously, As a marketing leader, there's a lot of really, really powerful martech tools out there. So I don't know that I have a specific one in mind, but I love all of the ones. There's lots of platforms. Some of you are probably building them where it helps us refine pipeline, do better lead scoring. And again, this is tying my background, AI, into it. So anything that can make my team more efficient in providing great leads and great opportunities to our sales team, I just find really, really powerful. I invest in some of them. I advise for some of them because I'm that passionate about it.

Great. What a great tie-in. All right. I know we only have 30 short minutes, so I am going to hand it over to you, Ashley, to take it away.

Yeah, thank you very much. And thank you, everybody, for joining. Um, as Caitlin mentioned, I'm Ashley Kramer. I'm Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at GitLab. I am actually currently right now acting CTO as well. So again, on the challenge side, what a better marketing opportunity than to run the engineering team that's, that's using our products to deploy our product every single day. And what we're going to talk about today is, is what I just mentioned earlier, um, open source communities and how that actually can become Your best marketing asset. And so let me give you a little bit of background on GitLab. So GitLab started in 2011 and was founded on a concept that developers didn't really have a place to all get together, to, to work together, to have that Google Sheets type experience where everybody's contributing together. And so one of our founders started this project around a developer collaboration tool, and what better way to get collaboration than to make it an open source project. Enter Sid C. Brandy, who is our co-founder and CEO now, as the second person to really understand this and the need of it in the market. And so Dmitry and Sid took the company and really drove it forward based on this open source concept and this collaboration tool for developers. And a fun fact, 10 years to the day of the first code check-in for our open source project, our company went public. And so that was in October of, of '21. And so super exciting. And what I'll say is because the project was deeply rooted, the software project was deeply rooted in open source, so is a lot of the things that we do and we believe in as a company. And that's what I'll talk to you about first. And so when you think about open source and how you can tie it into everything of how people operate, processes and product within a company, it really does have deep influence in that. And so let's, let's start on the people side. We have a really, really strong value system and it follows what we— the acronym CREDIT. And so that's Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. And that last one, that T one, we'll talk about quite a bit. Transparency, that's really important in the open source community. You have to be transparent about what you're doing, what other people are doing, and, um, because you're really working together and united around this project or this concept or whatever it is. And so on the people side, it's really, really important for us as we interview people to bring into the company that they really deeply align with our values. Uh, the next is process, making sure processes are really, really clear. And so GitLab has something called a public handbook. You can all go Google it right now if you don't want to listen to me anymore, but it's, you know, go put in GitLab handbook and you will see it's a lot. It's about 3,000 pages of everything from our company strategy, our product strategy, how marketing operates, how sales operates. And so it's a completely transparent model. Now, in full transparency, as a public company, there were some things that when we went public we had to bring into an internal handbook, but, um, I will I will channel our CEO Sid in saying that he always challenges us as GitLab team members to think public handbook first. And one side note on this, I have obviously a lot of good friends that are CMOs in the industry, and one emailed me the other day to thank me for our marketing handbook because her team was actually leveraging it as they were thinking about their strategy next year. And so it's, it's outside of just the product that we're building We're trying to foster this environment and have this open source mindset to help others in even the way that they operate their companies. And then finally, the, the probably most obvious one is product. And we'll talk about this a little bit later and why, um, to have an open— we call it core now— products, because we have all of these great GitLab engineers that are contributing to building this great platform for enterprises to use across the world. But we also have the open source community contributing to it and merging their code into it. And so what an awesome way to innovate faster and stay ahead of the competition. And so, so it really is about this open source mindset and it, in full transparency, coming from a company that wasn't open source or companies that wasn't open source and didn't have this high level of transparency, it's, it's a really, it's really unique, but it's really, really awesome. And, and we'll talk next about how that, That really filters into things like being inclusive, how important this transparency is, and the collaboration that is needed. So when it comes to— when it comes to transparency, we have all of these different ways that we operate in, you know, whether it's Slack in all of these channels, whether it's putting it in the public handbook to make sure that not only internally we're all aligned, but What an awesome thing for customers to have this transparency around roadmap, to have this transparency around how GitLab is thinking about moving forward in the future, how we're doing as a company. And, and it's really interesting as I go into sales conversations with customers, they really love that. They love that transparency and it makes them feel more comfortable investing in us because they feel like they're part of the team instead of just paying a vendor and hoping that they build and do the things that they want. The next is around being inclusive. So the one thing I have not mentioned that's pretty cool about GitLab is since the beginning we have always been a completely remote company. So we weren't one of those companies that had to close our offices when the pandemic hit and try to figure it out. We actually advised companies on what to do. Because of the fact that we've always been remote, that means we have people across the world, 62 countries, and You can't expect people in 62 different countries to attend the same meeting and to operate in the same way. And so we have a lot of principles that we follow, things like async meetings. And how that works is every meeting has an agenda and people go in and do any pre-reads that are attached. We don't present in meetings, which I'm very thankful for. We don't get presented to in meetings. We do our pre-work and then we go through and we add our questions. And sometimes, you know, somebody across the world might be asleep during the meeting. So they can say, you know, I'm Joe Smith and I'm gonna async this question, blah, blah, blah, blah, or I have this feedback. And then what Joe can do when he wakes up in whatever country he's in, we'll have verbalized that in the meeting and we'll have talked through his thought and we'll have thoughts back. And so he pops right back in and is part of the conversation. So it's all about finding all of these ways to be inclusive. Another thing to think about for those of you that might have this, same scenario, I do things like switch the time of my all hands so I can capture part of the marketing team, um, one month and the next month allow another part of the world to also join. And, and of course we record them and people can watch them. So really, really important to stay inclusive. And finally, just being collaborative. Nobody wants to work at a company where they feel like a bunch of execs are sitting in a room and making a decision. And so because of our open source mindset in the way that we work. And obviously I told you about the credit values. C is collaborative, uh, collaborative or collaboration. So important and top of mind to us. And we really, um, hold true to our overall company mission, which is make it so that everyone can contribute. And obviously the roots of that were open source contributing to a project, but we also open issues around things throughout the company. Hey, we're thinking of doing this, has nothing to do with development, has nothing to do with product. What do you think? And we allow people to And again, that makes people, no matter if they're an intern or an executive or somewhere in between, really, really feel part of the team and part of the company. And that for me coming in, I joined about 8 or 9 months ago, has just been a really, really awesome part of the culture. And then finally, the thing that I care most deeply about is having this, this open source concepts is really about, you know, having an active community, having product champions, and really allowing it so customers feel empowered. To me, that's my best marketing asset, and that's my product incubator. And so I have— we didn't talk about my background. You can go look on LinkedIn, but I've worn every hat. I've been a developer, I've been a product leader, I've been an engineering leader, I've been a marketing leader. And my biggest challenge as a product leader is you get in front of all these customers and they say, you know what, I have this idea and you write it down and you take it back to the team and then you build an ideas forum and people go and contribute. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. And it actually has the complete opposite effect. Customers start to get very upset that you're not listening. The great news about open core and the open source community is customers can co-create. And so you can allow customers, whether they're sitting within an organization or they're just part of the wider community, to actually come in and say, oh, I understand that, that you would love this as part of the GitLab platform. I'm just going to go contribute that code. And so for them, they get the feature they want. And for us, we can provide that to all of the other customers using the platform across the world. So again, staying ahead of innovation and really, really just being able to have all of these powerful pieces of capability and functionality going out from a marketing perspective to talk to about our customers. This, this obviously is hugely impactful when you think about the competitive nature. Most of our competitors out there are closed, are closed platforms. And so from that perspective, we have people everywhere helping us and contributing. And we do— some of you might have the question of how do you make sure the code stays secure? We have a very high quality and secure platform. but we do have people within GitLab that review the code, give feedback to people if anything needs changed, and make sure to run the security tests on it. We actually have integrated security as part of the platform, and then put it in. So, so we do have those checks and balances, and that is important. And then the last one is gamify it. It's really, really fun to, you know, hold hackathons with our, with our community heroes and really, um, you know, get them certified and reward them. So it feels fun and it feels, you know, like they're not just contributing because it's what their organization needs or just as a side project for fun, but it makes it fun and it really, really creates this active both GitLab and wider community and really drives value. And so I want to stop there because I definitely want to leave time for questions. But ultimately for me, and this is from a perspective of a person in seat for less than a year, having never been part of an open source company, an open source community. Absolutely hands down my best marketing asset, our best product incubator, and something that I think will be a giant competitive advantage moving forward for this company for all of the reasons that I just said. And with that, let me stop sharing and let's go to some questions.

Great. Okay, everyone feel free to put questions in the chat. Or raise your hands and I can call on you to ask them. We do have one to get started. In your opinion, what marketing channel works best for engaging OS communities?

Yeah, so it's really interesting. To me, it's— we could take one of two approaches. We could have our own forum, but that's not very open. That's kind of, you know, that's just the GitLab community. So we really like to have a presence where, you know, our core audience, at least our core users, is developers. So we show up where they are. And so as far as a channel and where we do targeted advertising and where we like to chime in, it's all of the places, the StackOverflows, the Reddits, the places that you would think developers naturally, quote unquote, hang out. And so from that perspective, and we have two selling motions, we have the product-led growth, developer starts using us. We have a free product, of course, as good open source stewards. But then we also do the C-level sales where, um, somebody just has a really massive problem with efficiency, quality, security within, within their software development life cycle. And so from that perspective, little bit of a different channel, but I think that the question was probably targeting those actual open source developers. And so my advice is show up where they are. Don't, don't try to create a new place for them. Show up where they're already hanging out.

Great. I guess that does already tie into this second question of, is there a marketing channel that you've seen work least for attracting people to the OS communities?

Yeah, I think it's, it's trying to create your own, right? There's enough out there. It's true. It's, you know, fostering an environment where you're opening it up to the wider community and where people are already naturally spending their time. I think the The least successful approach is probably trying to create your own new path. I wouldn't recommend that.

Great. Jason, I see you have a few questions in the chat. Do you want to unmute yourself and ask them aloud?

Oh, sure. I want to do both. I had two. The first one is just interesting, and maybe my view is a little superficial of GitLab, so forgive me. But how did you guys break out as like an enterprise leader, as a strategy? And more importantly today, right? As you're coming up, you know, over, over half a billion in revenue. How do you think about this strategically as CMO? Like, how do you, how do you maintain this enterprise space, especially when you're competing with other large enterprise players? Like, how do you think about this strategically?

Yeah, I mean, this is where open source is really a compet— there are other competitors. The good news for us is most competitors, whereas you think of we take customer or we take our core audience, our developers, security professionals, and operations professionals through that entire lifecycle if they choose to use our full platform. Most competitors just do one or two of those, what I'll call, for lack of better words, stages of the lifecycle. We do have one big competitor that has a similar approach to us platform. They don't have some of the same differentiators, but also they're closed core. And so again, when it comes to product incubation, our open core nature and our transparency is really helpful there. The way that we broke into enterprise, because clearly starting as open source and it's more product-led growth and developers finding out about you, was actually just signals we saw. You know, we start with 5 developers and the next thing we know there's 50 and then 500, and then the executive starts saying, "Okay, I need to understand more about this." And that's where, as I mentioned earlier, what I'm excited about, great, since we have one platform, we have all of your metrics right here in one place. So now we can show you in one place everything you need to know about vulnerability, developer productivity, ROI in general of your spend on this. So it naturally and organically happened, And the balance I have to do as a marketing leader is I still want that PLG motion. I don't— I absolutely don't want to remove that. But now we also have other opportunities to go and have that C-level buyer messaging. And so for me, it's a— it's an interesting balance. It's not exactly 50/50 all the time, but it's— but it's actually— I just got out of a marketing meeting. My whole marketing team is in San Diego with me today, and we were just talking about what we want the split to be next year based on signals of last year.

Well, that's interesting. Not to monopolize all the time, but that was actually my second question, but you answered it in a more sophisticated fashion. My second question was, how much time are you able to spend on free? Like, how do you budget your circle? Maybe we call free PLG, right? Because that's free into smaller, right? But your ratio, even at your scale, is 50/50. You spend half of your— you and your team's time on the PLG side and half on the big co side. Is that what you meant?

I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say it's at 50/50 exactly. And I wouldn't say the sales cycles are obviously the same, but we do have, we do, one of the things you all noticed, I have strategy officer in my title. One of the things we did when I joined the company is we have product-led growth, like, so the product, the engineering, everything within that group, within marketing, so we can all be aligned around how those different motions play in together and tie into the same campaigns versus different ones. So I wouldn't say it's exactly a 50/50 split. And enterprise always takes more conversations, you know, product-led growth, you learn from the product, that's, you learn based on signals in the product. A lot of times at enterprise, you learn from, I did a NASDAQ dinner last week that we threw in coordination. Some of those 2-minute conversations I had were some of the most powerful I've had at that level. So it's, I guess it's personally, because you're asking how much of my time. Often the team can look at the signals in PLG, and I'm trying to learn what does that CIO need to feel comfortable making this big purchase, and how can I stay connected as the executive sponsor?

I see. So at your level, you've got the CSO and CMO and CTO. You got a lot of hats.

That one will go away. CTO will go away.

But you're using these PLG motions so that you can focus on a lot of enterprise learnings, right? Meeting with the NASDAQ. Maybe the last one, just because it's so interesting and I know we have short time, help us understand how you structure your team because that relates to the question. Like, how many folks do you have? How much are in the PLG reports to you? So that's a learning right there, right? Who's doing what on your team?

Yeah, so we segment it. I segment my team the common way for core marketing. So product marketing and brand are together. You know, corp comms reports to me. The integrated marketing has all of those motions around building pipe, whether it's net new or growth. And then to your question, I have a PLG leader that reports directly to me that has counterparts that we kept in engineering, but he has a products team reporting to me. And then he works really closely and sits right— sits virtually right next to my marketing strategy and analytics leader because everything she's gathering, the dashboards she's building, are the signals that he needs to be successful to go tell our GitLab engineers what to build for product-led growth. Does that make sense?

That's super helpful. Thank you.

Great.

You're welcome.

Great questions.

Thanks for those questions, Jason. Scott, if you want to unmute yourself and ask your question.

Okay, sure. Yeah, thanks, Ashley. This is great. I said we're GitLab customers, love the company, love the open nature. I think wanting to adopt some of those things in our organization We operate in a highly regulated space, and a lot of our customers might be direct competitors with, with us. So it kind of started with, you know, how do we dip our toe into being a little bit more open and encouraging our community, you know, in ways that GitLab has, and how do we balance that?

Yeah, and I, I did mention open core because everything is not completely open, of course, because, you know, we sell to federal, and we— and so from that perspective, I think over time you learn the pieces that can and should stay open and the pieces that, for the good of customer and competition, you know, always customer-centric and customer-first mindset there. And so from that perspective, yeah, as, as you grow up as an open source company, you, you learn those different, those different signals. And then the other thing that I would say is, you know, we, for the reason that you're saying, like regulated space, which isn't exactly your question, but we have all of the different models. So you can download it, you can download GitLab and use it and self-manage it yourself. You can use our multi-tenant SaaS And down the road, we'll evolve that multi-tenant SaaS into a single-tenant approach as well.

Thanks.

All right. We are just about at time, and we do have a hard stop today. So thank you so much to everyone for joining us. I know I said we would be here every week, but next week is an exception. We will be taking next week off due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Um, but thank you, Ashley, so much for joining us.

Thank you, Ashley.

Great conversation. And we really appreciate the insights. We will see you not next week, but in 2 weeks at 10:00 AM Pacific at Building for Builders: Creating Enterprise Platforms with Airtable. All right. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you again, Ashley. And we will see you in 2 weeks.

Thanks everyone.