Collaborating with cross-functional peers asynchronously

CHALLENGE

Involving cross-functional stakeholders in the design process

Bringing together cross-functional teams into the design process is a key factor for success at GitLab, but to break the silos, Christie and team needed an intuitive platform that allowed for open collaboration, regardless of design experience.

“GitLab is a great platform for asynchronous work. That’s what it’s built for,” explains Christie. “The platform is very structured so we decided to seek out a tool for our product managers and designers to collaborate and brainstorm informally. While product managers and designers are the primary personas that utilize Mural, they’re not the only ones. The benefits extend to marketing teams and developers as well."

Another main challenge for the UX team at GitLab was defining and organizing Jobs To Be Done. The process of planning new features or product updates is very open-ended, so capturing everyone’s ideas and organizing them into logical groupings are critical steps. If designers began this ideation process within a design tool, then it limited collaboration because they were using an interface that was specific to their own work, instead of a platform that was comfortable for cross-functional peers, like developers.  

“A design tool tends to be very specific to designers,” Valerie Karnes, Director of Product Design at GitLab, says, “and typically you have to have some kind of license to access it. It becomes more about the designers just sharing their work, and it makes it difficult for a product manager or even a researcher to jump in and have input, whereas Mural is a shared collaborative space that allows everyone to contribute.”

“We wanted a place where cross-functional peers could come together and have an easy way to collaborate and get their ideas out in a free-form way,” adds Christie.