An overview of this role

You'll lead the Core Planning team within GitLab's Plan stage, reimagining how development teams organize, coordinate, and plan their work at enterprise scale. Right now, planning is fragmented—teams juggle issues, epics, and tickets while struggling to connect their daily work to business outcomes. You'll solve this by building flexible, configurable planning fundamentals that replace outdated agile mechanisms with intelligent automation. Your focus will be on evolving our work item model, integrating agentic AI functionality that handles repetitive planning tasks, and freeing up teams to focus on what matters: strategy, intent, and delivery. You'll report to a Group Manager of Product, working closely with product design and engineering leadership to define planning for a modern, AI-powered world. In your first year, you'll reshape the core planning experience that millions of developers across 100,000+ GitLab customers will rely on—transforming how teams think about planning, not as a burden, but as an intelligent partner in their success.

What you’ll do

Lead the Core Planning team's vision and strategy, guiding GitLab's shift from traditional agile planning mechanics toward enterprise-ready planning fundamentals that empower teams to organize, coordinate, and execute work more effectively
Own the product strategy for work items—simplifying the fragmented landscape of issues, epics, and tickets into a configurable, unified primitive that scales across organizations of any size
Drive the integration of agentic AI functionalities into planning workflows, replacing manual planning tasks with intelligent automation while ensuring trustworthiness and reliability for end users
Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, design, and product teams to understand developer and engineering manager needs, translating them into products that improve team coordination and workflow
Define how planning connects to business outcomes, helping teams understand the ROI of their work and make data-driven capacity and cycle-time decisions
Co-shape the product's approach to managing context and knowledge, ensuring critical business information and specifications flow seamlessly through the development lifecycle
Partner with the Knowledge & Context and Project Management teams within Plan stage to balance responsibilities and eliminate redundancy as the planning experience evolves in the SDLC

What you’ll bring

Experience building or shipping products for SaaS, DevOps, or DevSecOps platforms, or working in scale-ups in adjacent spaces
Working knowledge of software development and familiarity with how development teams organize and coordinate their work
Demonstrated ability to collaborate closely with engineering teams and use data and metrics to inform product decisions
Comfort learning quickly in new domains and adapting your approach and decision making based on new information, rather than relying primarily on past patterns
Track record of picking things up efficiently and getting productive in new product areas or organizations without extended onboarding periods
A mindset that values fresh perspectives and questioning existing approaches, even if you've worked in related spaces before
Experience working in distributed or remote environments, or collaborating with teams across different regions and time zones with excellent verbal and written communication skills.

About the team

The Plan stage is reimagining how development teams organize, coordinate, and execute their work. The Core Planning team you'll lead is at the heart of this transformation, owning the foundational workflows and mechanics that enable teams to plan effectively at scale. Working closely with engineering partners and product designers, your team is responsible for simplifying how work items (issues, epics, and tickets) are configured and coordinated, while simultaneously building trustworthy AI-powered agentic functionalities that free humans from repetitive planning tasks so they can focus on strategy and intent. You'll be tackling some of the most interesting challenges in DevOps: moving teams beyond traditional agile estimation guessing games toward real data-driven capacity planning, connecting business outcomes to actual team velocity, and scaling planning workflows across organizations with hundreds of developers. The team operates asynchronously across distributed regions and collaborates closely with engineering (led by your EM counterpart), design, and the broader Plan stage initiatives focused on knowledge management and intelligent automation. This is an opportunity to shape how millions of developers work together, replacing manual, repetitive planning mechanics with intelligent systems that amplify human decision-making.

Senior Product Manager, Plan

EMEA

Remote

Senior

GitLab