GitLab UX Research, 1 Apr 2021

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From YouTube: Dakota JTBD Strategic Research

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https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/-/issues/1161

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My name is jackie porter and today we're going to talk a little bit about the strategic research that we've been conducting in a q1 of fiscal year, 22.

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over in ux, we've been focused on defining jobs to be done around dakota, the application development director and specifically, we've been working on defining if there is a difference in the jobs to be done between enterprises and potentially smb or free dakotas.

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So the focus has been really understanding. Are there decisions that a application director that they go through at an enterprise that they're making as they go through and just choosing tools that is different at an enterprise rather than when they are at a small medium-sized business and when they are going through this exercise?

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Are they doing different tasks? And we learned some interesting things about dakota.

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So in the current state, dakota is a key application leader they're leading managers of application development teams, and they are automating development processes, specifically around development operations.

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They are motivated by managing teams and systems and they're really about optimizing uh and growing their managers and their teams and delivery of processes.

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So a lot of their focus as we currently have it documented, is about building this efficiency inside of their inside of their team they're, balancing, also things around organizational planning and balancing strategic needs with the business needs.

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When we conducted interviews, we completed nine different interviews across organizations that had uh between 500 and over 20 000 employees. These were directors of engineering, application, directors across four different industries, and we had about six different insights that came out of these different uh application engineers, engineering directors.

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We learned that dakota is typically balancing a budget in that organization, where they're justifying uh their spending that same budget on tools or people each year. So it's one budget that they are either buying more tools or more head count.

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Dakota is also typically bound by that organizational tooling, and they can make decisions up to a certain point and across these nine different directors, that number ended up being 50k or under so they could move really fast. Sometimes they could move as fast as two weeks on a tool for their development team if the tool is under 50k.

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Dakota is also really obsessed with finding the right tool for their team and oftentimes. The vp of their organization or their chief technology officer of their organization will give them budget for those tools.

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If they're able to drive the right results for their team and accomplish the goals, that's been set in front of them and deliver the the job effectively.

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Dakota is typically reporting to a vp of engineering or vp of application development. In some cases they are also reporting to a board member. It's interesting that that was about 50 of these nine application directors that they disclosed that information and something that's different, is the dakotas that we interviewed also have up to 15 direct reports.

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So not only were they managers of managers, but they were often managing people that were technical leads, so they were architects, engineering, staff members, they were technical people, not just managers, and then lastly, the biggest insight of them all is dakota is not primarily motivated by team throughput they're, not looking for ultimately driving the most efficient teams, but rather team effectiveness.

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The business is incentivizing dakota to make really great decisions um which is based off of the maturity of the organization and the vertical that the or the the company is in.

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So out of all of these insights we'll be updating the page that currently exists to include a snippet on the smb side. That dakota is the core signature authority and they're, the one that makes exclusive decision making for groups under 500 under the motivations.

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We're also going to be adding a big piece of this balancing budget and making sure that the team is highly effective and then, when it comes to this idea of company and team details, we'll be expanding it to make sure that we include this idea that they can have a large amount of direct reports that they're not just this manager of manager's relationship, that they can oversee technical resources and teammates.

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Beyond this, just management hierarchy.

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We learned a significant amount about what directors are doing and what this means really in the grand scheme of how we can start to think about positioning dakota inside of our jobs, to be done for the ops section, which is what this research was meant to help inform is we can start thinking about um dashboarding inside of the dev ops, adoption context more holistically, because these organizations are not just about driving teams throughput they're about tying it back to the overall budget, which is the same pool of money.

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Custom metrics are something that organizations are tying back to their team effectiveness, so making sure that we're able to go back to the overall organizational roi is really significant.

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Lastly, we weren't able to confirm that there was any value in showing how much ci minutes an organization was saving with gitlab ci as a huge driver of return on investment, so that priority is not really confirmed with dakota like if, if we were able to show a 20 of efficiency, gain that wouldn't necessarily correlate um with an additional purchase value. So a big part of the survey questions that we were asking in these research was hey application director.

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If this tool was able to show you that your teams are 20 more efficient, how much more would you pay for that and consistently nine of these directors confirm that you know it really depends.

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I don't think that that that 20 would actually need to replace one and a half or two people in order to to effectively um show its value uh to recoup that budget.

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So the fact that their budget constraints as a director in a large enterprise is so compelling that amount of efficiency isn't necessarily driving forward as much as we initially thought in our assumptions, so we'll need to make sure that we're going back to these devops adoption metrics that the value stream delivery team and the door four metric.

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The release team are working toward as our main source of metrics, which is great from a cross-stage holistic collaboration and then, of course, runner enterprise management and reducing friction in the the team's collaboration, which will help dakota in making her team effective, less about driving efficiency and more about making the team work better together.

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So anything that we can do to reduce friction across the team will be our priority and verify now that we know that that those are where dakota is looking to help make her budget optimized altogether really happy with the results that we got out of the research and excited to share this feedback with you all.