How PMs Use Nitro for Small Code Changes

When I was first introduced to our agentic development tool, Nitro, back in October, I was curious, but a tad skeptical. Truthfully, that’s because I didn’t really understand the high-level technical process behind it, or how it worked in practical terms for someone who’s not a developer. 

Fast forward to now, and I’m using Nitro to spin up at least one MR every day or two. Getting to this point did come with a learning curve (especially understanding why smaller MRs are more efficient), and there are still adjustments I’m working through as a Product Manager. However, whether it’s updating copy, adding an icon, or redirecting a link, Nitro removes the need to distract the team from the high impact, highly technical projects with smaller tweaks that compound over time.

When making small changes with Nitro, over half my personal workload also diminishes; I would act as the messenger between stakeholder and user, write up the ticket, coordinate and follow up with everything once complete. Now Nitro takes the context straight from Slack and spins up a change, ready for review by a developer. A real-life example of Nitro in action looks like:

Sure, there are some drawbacks today. Sometimes Nitro produces a solution that isn’t ideal once you add a developer’s context and understanding of the problem. Occasionally, it takes more time for the dev to review and provide feedback then it would have been to write the code from scratch. But nine times out of ten, it works well for the smaller use cases.

For the not-so-technical, Nitro also excels at answering contextual questions: how something was built, who built it, when it was built, and what changes were made. That’s been a major unlocking of tough to find information. Once again, Nitro is reducing the need for me to interrupt developers and enabling more autonomy when trying to understand feature changes, metric shifts, or even unintended bugs reported by raised to Product through Customer Support.

Nitro has been a gateway into understanding, and empathizing with, the world of a software developer; from the review process, to what makes a good MR, to getting more comfortable with the (previously intimidating) buttons in GitLab 🙂.  I’m excited to see what Nitro unlocks for the product next, and how that translates into speeding up our delivery of a great user experience.

Harry Verran, Staff Product Manager @ Fullscript