Meltano Roadmap
Meltano enables anyone with access to SaaS APIs and spreadsheets to generate dashboards summarizing the status of their business operations.
Mission
Provide a simple way to connect data source(s) and generate reports in minutes. through an all-in-one bundled solution, which is optimized for breadth over depth to offer basic functionality at each step of the data pipeline.
Vision
Meltano's mission aligns with the GitLab mission, which is "to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute". When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors and we greatly increase the rate of human progress.
Our contribution to this progress comes through the democratization of data throughout organizations. We help our customers integrate a wide range of data sets to create a single source of truth.
Persona
Meltano is a small startup within GitLab, and in order to be successful we have chosen to ruthlessly focus on a serving a single person.
Target Persona Type: Founder
Our target persona has the following traits:
- One busy person at a startup using Meltano in single player mode
- They have access to all systems and data across the company
- New to data (does not write code, queries, etc.)
- Need to do analysis to run the business
- Needs to do both engineering tasks and analyst tasks because there is nobody else
What they are not:
- Don't have "analyst" in their job title. They perform that function because they have to, and likely are CEO/founder running a department that has a lot of SaaS tools and data, likes sales or marketing. They are setting up the foundational systems in the company.
- Don't have technical know-how or the time for setting up a server, using the command line, writing code, creating custom taps, targets, transforms or models. They are running their company, and have a thousand other things to do.
Other Persona Types
There are other personas we are explicitly NOT building Meltano for who may discover our tools and become users or contributors:
- Data Analysts
- Data Engineers
- Machine Learning Engineers
Focus
The focus of our team is to grow MAUI by 10% every week. A week is measured from Sunday to Saturday. Every improvement we make should be optimized by that. This means sometimes we should prioritize promotion (blog, twitter, video, talk) and usability (docs, UX) over new features.
MAUI
Meltano's primary KPI is Monthly Active UI Users (MAUI). MAUI is pronounced like the island.
The graph below shows our MAUI growth progress at the end of October 2019. At the target pace (in red) we will have 1,000 MAUI by the end of 2019. While we experienced significant month-over-month growth of MAUI relative to September (+90%), we are still behind pace.
Read the October 2019 recap post on the Meltano blog.
Other Metrics
We track the leading indicators upstream of MAUI in the funnel to understand the health of our user adoption funnel from first impression to fully onboarded user:
Internal metrics:
MAUI
We also track the Monthly Active UI Users (MAUI). MAUI is pronounced like the island.
Internal metrics:
Business Model
Meltano is a free and open source project, and the team is employed by GitLab. In the future, we are likely to introduce proprietary features as we work toward a sustainable business model. At this time, we do not have specific plans in that regard.
Cadence
Release Schedule
Meltano currently follows a weekly release schedule on Mondays.
For our recent changes, you can check our CHANGELOG.
You can track our weekly progress and forward-looking plans in greater detail through our milestones.
The release process is covered in more detail in the Handbook.
History
Meltano was launched in August 2018 by the GitLab Data & Analytics team, and is now an internal startup within GitLab.