Working with use cases

Sourcegraph has a shared set of use cases that flow through much of what we do, and this page is intended to describe how we use them.

One common misconception about our use cases is that they only impact Product Management, Sales, Marketing, or any other single department. The reality is that our use cases have been chosen with end-to-end customer flows in mind, and traverse not only multiple feature areas within the product, but different departments as well. By aligning our thinking around these important solutions, we deliver valuable features and can tell a consistent story that resonates with our users.

Marketing

Centering our work around use cases allows Marketing to focus efforts based on the most compelling solutions for our target personas. They help us to break through ambivalence to create a sense of urgency for customers, making Sourcegraph a need to have, not a nice to have. They ensure that there is consistency of messaging across the organization—from marketing to sales to CE to the product experience, we pull people in with a promise we can deliver.

Use-case driven content can be tailored to each persona or account, letting us test and find the best messaging. They help us build solution-based journeys, supported by customer stories, white papers, etc., and provide a clear foundation for go-to-market content that can educate, guide, and generate interest/leads. Defined use cases also map to value drivers that can improve how we represent our value in business cases and ROI analysis.

Sales & CE

Sales and CE leverage them across the entire funnel:

  • PipeGen - to create clear interest/need from our prospects by showing them how we can solve the problems that they are currently facing in their business
  • Active Opportunities - as the basis for establishing the value of solving those problems, proving our ability to solve them through POCs, communicating why they need to solve them now, and why Sourcegraph is uniquely able to solve them better than any other option
  • Expansion/Retention - to broaden our adoption and usage within existing customer accounts, by showcasing all the ways in which customers can realize value from Sourcegraph

For Sales & CE, a good use case is:

  • Value driven, and aligns to quantitative and/or qualitative benefits
  • Aligns directly to the biggest issues our target market is currently facing and ideally drive urgency (i.e. need to have vs. nice to have)
  • Demonstrable; tell a cohesive narrative by tying together all parts of our product
  • Able to be tested discretely and completely (timeboxed) by a customer to prove out the value

Product & Engineering

The use cases are problems that our product is currently solving. In Product and Engineering, we’re building for the use cases, demonstrating a clear progression of solving our customers (and potential customers) pain points over time. When we talk about what’s coming next on the roadmap, we think about how we’re enhancing the product to better solve these use cases. Use cases provide general alignment and focus that the team is constantly thinking about, across the organization and within our product teams and features. When we package together all of Sourcegraph’s features—search, code insights, code intelligence, batch changes, Cloud - we’re able to package it into a really compelling story that is the use case for the end user.

Product needs use cases to:

  • Contain specific, demoable workflows/happy paths through the product
  • Articulate the problem or pain point it solves
  • Be possible with the product we have today