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Product Direction - Fulfillment: Subscription Management

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Last updated: 2024-07-20

Mission

Deliver an easy, informed, and reliable experience for customers to purchase GitLab products, manage their subscriptions, and view billing details and contacts.

Overview

The Subscription Management team is responsible for providing customers with the tools and functionality to purchase GitLab products and manage their subscriptions effectively.

Key focus areas

  1. Empower customers to purchase new products and make changes to their subscriptions without requiring assistance from GitLab support or sales teams.
  2. Automate subscription management with features like Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation (QSR) and Auto-Renewal to streamline processes for customers and internal teams.
  3. Continuously improve the Customers Portal to ensure a seamless and intuitive experience for all user types, including self-service, sales-assisted, and channel partner customers.
  4. Given the global commerce functionality, support compliance, legal, and tax related efforts to safeguard revenue and meet regulations.

By focusing on these areas, the Subscription Management team aims to reduce friction in the subscription lifecycle, improve customer satisfaction, and support GitLab's overall growth and retention goals.

Target audience and experience

Feature overview and maturity

Feature Maturity Description To reach the next Maturity level
Purchase subscription 😊 Viable First time and repeat purchases of Gitlab.com and Self-managed subscriptions, as well as add-ons such as Storage, Compute Minutes and Duo Pro.  
View subscriptions 😊 Viable Gitlab.com, SM, Dedicated subscriptions can be viewed in the Customers Portal.  
Renew subscription 😊 Viable Gitlab.com and SM subscriptions can be renewed with a credit card.  
Auto-Renew subscription 🙂 Minimal Gitlab.com and SM subscriptions can be auto-renewed, certain exclusion apply.  
Add seats to a subscription 😊 Viable Gitlab.com and SM subscriptions can have seats added with a credit card.  
Remove seats from a subscription ✖️ Not Planned  
Upgrade a subscription 😊 Viable Gitlab.com and SM Premium subscriptions can be upgraded to Ultimate with a credit card.  
Downgrade a subscription ✖️ Not planned  
View invoices 😊 Viable All customers that purchased directly from GitLab can view their invoices.  
Pay for the invoice ✖️ Not planned, but evaluating the need.  
Manage payment methods 😊 Viable All customers that purchased directly from GitLab can view and manage their credit cards.  
Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation (QSR) process 🙂 Minimal QSR will process for some use cases of SaaS and SM subscriptions (Self-Service and Sales Assisted) that are opted into QSR.  
Special UX for Channel Partner customers 😊 Viable Channel customers are able to login, manage contact information, view subscriptions and licenses. They get directed to the GitLab Partner to make subscription changes.  
Emails/In-app notifications related to subscription management 🙂 Minimal    

Legend:

Roadmap and Planning

Current opportunities

Opportunity Solution(s)
There are two self-service purchase flows for Gitlab.com subscriptions - one on gitlab.com and another in the Customers Portal. Neither of these flows is fully functional, leading to customer confusion and placing an extra burden on the engineering team to support and develop features for both. Here is our plan to improve the purchase flows:
1. Move purchase flows from .com to the Customers Portal.
2. Improve the purchase flows in the Customers Portal following the migration from .com.
3. Unify all purchase flows in the Customers Portal to enhance scalability and improve the user experience.

Next opportunities

Opportunity Solution(s)
The renewal process currently does not support all subscription use cases. Although GitLab's product offering now includes several renewable subscription add-ons, only subscriptions with a single renewable product are capable of being renewed. We plan to enhance renewal functionality to accommodate additional use cases.
1. Combine multiple rate plans for the same product during renewal.
2. Update renewal flow to accommodate all renewable products in the subscription.
Customers would like the ability to add extra billing and subscription contacts to their accounts without contacting Support. 1. Enable customers to invite multiple billing account managers to the Billing Account.

Future opportunities

Opportunity Solution(s)
Customers often find Upcoming Renewal emails confusing, as they tend to be irrelevant, unclear, and lacking actionable information. Move subscription renewal emails out of Zuora and into CustomersDot. This will allow us to limit which emails are sent, and customize their contents.

What we recently completed

Most recently completed projects are shown first.

  1. Support for 3D Secure authentication for credit card payments.
  2. New Navigation for the Customers Portal, which enables BillTo/Sold contact management and displays Billing Account Managers.
  3. Updated subscription display in the Customers Portal so that it's more user friendly and scalable for various product offerings.
  4. Allowing customers that puchased via Reseller to access Customers Portal.
  5. Renewal discounting functionality in preparation for the GitLab Premium Price update.
  6. New subscription display in the Customers Portal for ramp subscriptions.
  7. Research on the renewal experience and existing processes, involving both internal teams and GitLab customers, to understand and enhance the overall renewal process.
  8. Subscription auto-renewal for all major use cases.
  9. Improved transparency into the overages and related billing for SaaS customers at the time of adding users.

Reference to OKRs, Epics, Issues and Boards

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