GitLab

“For very early companies, the best companies I know are almost a hundred percent in person.”

“In every one of these examples, you have a co-located counterfactual that is sometimes orders of magnitude bigger.”

“Our policy is like be as transparent as possible. So if it's not customer data, it's not vulnerability information. We heavily encourage the team to put their videos, like record their videos, sometimes even live stream them onto our YouTube channel.”

“The great example I can give you is like, we get people who then contribute because of what they see. And so we've had, you know, customers, open source community members go, oh, I can go build that. I know what that is. And they will just Knock it out and do …”

“We'll have companies who will fork the handbook cause it's just source available too. At the bottom of the page, you can click views, view source. And I just heard from a company who's now becoming a customer who were like, we wanted to redo our UX mission and…”

“So the first one is our issue tracker for everything we're doing. The majority of those issues are public. It's also available for people who have an account. To also create and comment on.”

“It's product's job to be ambitious and it's engineering's job to meet that ambition.”

“We still ship 12 releases a year. It used to be on the 22nd of every month. It's now the third Thursday, so we don't have to have people work over a weekend. We've done that for over a decade and our last release put us at 149 releases that have come out essen…”

“GitLab has had its fair share of things at times where an issue is public that probably shouldn't have been public, like in our issue tracker, or, you know, the recording accidentally gets set to public when it should have been set to private.”

“It's actually a lot easier to be transparent than it is to not be transparent. Cause now you don't have to worry about tracking things you may or may not have said. Think about, well, did this person hear it or were they not in that meeting? Like it just becom…”

“You don't want someone to take a public message the wrong way. And so you take that conscious step to say like, Hey, I gotta give that feedback. Let me do that one-on-one. And that means like, if it's in a public channel, it's even easier to assume the positiv…”

“So the short toes is, you know, it's really about the, it's about the work. It's not about you. And so if you have made something and you're getting feedback on it, try to realize that is someone trying to help you make it better and not a personal view of how…”

“The three-year strategy says our goal is to become the first all ops platform. And that is essentially to say that we want to be the single source of truth for R&D organizations.”

“We have, I think, 72,000 open issues right now in our backlog”

“So I think it really kind of dives into the remote experience. Remote is not for everyone. And we'll have people who come and they're really great. They don't even have to be an under performer, but they're missing that in office every day feeling. Maybe some,…”

“We were pre the pandemic when we were around 1100 people.”

“One thing he said was that, you know, if you think you're communicating a hundred percent accurately, that's probably a 60 or 70% for the other person and shoot for like a 150%. And so that's something that I think really helps in that environment.”

“You know, the way I tell people who are new in their career, maybe they're now an associate or intermediate PM at lab or other places I've worked that like, if everyone's really annoyed at you, you're probably actually doing your job well.”

“If you're in an all remote world, your requirements have to be clear. You know, sometimes you can get away with, Hey, this, I have a daily stand up or a couple of weeks stand up. And then you use that as the opportunity to clarify something. You have to get it…”

“And so as part of the interview process at GitLab, we do what's called a deep dive interview, where we have the person try that out and they engage with another person or product who's playing the engineering side of that conversation.”

“GitLab is very anti-email in a lot of ways. Obviously we use it for external communication, but internally it's on an issue. It's in Slack or it goes into the handbook, right?”

“If he's communicating asynchronously and giving clear outcomes and empowering the people who make the decision, it's okay that they may not have overlap.”

“Now, last year we made the conscious decision to start to pivot to depth over breadth. And that's because we have a very broad platform today. We are touching everything from business continuity planning and OKRs to Enterprise agile planning and team planning …”

“We have around 16 models we use today to make GitLab have its AI suite, which is called GitLab Duo.”

“And we are currently working on expanding into observability and service management, but it is truly an amazing experience.”

“GitLab's all remote. You're dead in the water if you can't write clearly at GitLab, so it was testing all those things at once.”

“There are two that we used at SendGrid and GitLab that I think were essential. One was a one pager called an opportunity canvas, which asked PMs to outline sort of the concept they wanted to build. And the other one, it's like a two to six pager. I think Kevin…”

“The one I did at GitLab for the whole product was probably a couple pages. Two, two, maybe three. It wasn't that long.”

“PMs always have two tracks going. At least that's how we ran it in Sengri and GitLab. There's a validation track where you're doing your homework on the things you want to pump into engineering, and then you have a build track.”

“If you really understand them, then you're going to tee up the right work, which is going to drive results. Ultimately you want to drive results, but how do you get there? I think the building block is having a ton of. Perspective on the target user and what t…”

“And then from there, you're trying to prove business impact. So make sure you have a KPI that leadership cares about, that maps to the work that you report on regularly and openly and honestly.”

“At GitLab, we recorded all of them, and we posted them, and anybody who wanted to watch them could. So we were very transparent about all these meetings. You could see them all as an internal employee.”

“Venture capital is a niche, niche, niche asset class only designed for outliers. It is, the job is to find an outlier. It is to find a GitLab. It is to find an Okta. It is to find a Stripe. It is to find an Algolia. That is the job. The job is not to find a te…”

“As customers are contributing code to our platform, we are able to share that as part of our platform with the entire world. So it sort of opens up all the contributors in the world. To be part of our team and part of our development and innovation and really …”

“And so you don't necessarily need a CMO or anybody in marketing to really drive this when you start as that, as your root, as open source as your root, you open it up for the people that are contributing to the product that clearly believe in it because they'r…”

“But we still have a group and it reports directly to me. That is developer relations and community. And so we run specific products through that, like our code contributor program, where we still do those exact same things. We still have hackathons where we br…”

“So you have a company that's using our platform really widely. They want a few more capabilities. Don't wait on us. We'll empower you and teach you how to have some code contributors in seat so you can move faster. And then of course we get the value from that…”

“Do we put this in our free version, which we will always have as a good open source steward, or is this something that falls as part of our paid for package?”

“We have promises. So we have 11 promises listed out there on what we will follow to make sure that we're continuing to serve the community that helped us get where we are today, but also understanding that we're a commercial product now, and then help them dif…”

“Another one we have is that we'll always release an open source, the tests that we have for an open source feature. We'll share that with the world.”

“I'm a product manager in, in as my background, and often people would talk to you and say, I want this feature and you talk them in this giant circle that makes them feel really loved, but is also kind of telling them no, whether they get that or not. And so w…”

“And then the other thing that really, really works, particularly in upper mid market to enterprise field events. Field events have been back for about a year and they're almost even more popular now because for two years we all sat in our houses and stared at …”

“So Ciro and I jointly own expansion. So we're driving the pipeline for expansion. And of course he owns the overall number, which can be a mix of, is a mix of net new and growth.”

“And so at GitLab, we really believe on having a DRI for everything, a directly responsible individual. And then of course there's a ton of contributors. And so there will be several of my VPs that contribute To each of them.”

“Outside of some, you know, I visit with a lot of customers in PubSec, and that is actually for a lot of the agencies, a requirement.”

“And so that's not something that happens overnight. That's something that will take about three years probably for Gartner to say, no, GitLab was right. It is a DevSecOps platform MQ that we're going to do.”

“Instead, we stepped back and said, the value of AI on our platform is along every step in the software delivery life cycle. So that will be one piece of it. And customers absolutely need to know we have it and prospects, but we should be telling an end to end …”

“So we've built a product marketing team that is Getting deeper and deeper. They're matched with product managers, and they're getting deeper and deeper into how our product works and understanding the value of it to really want the product managers to come tog…”

“This is the first company where I actually know everything after we do an earnings call and our windows open and our CFO goes on the roadshow. I understand what they're saying and not just me. He sends out a slack to the entire company of the sentiment, the ov…”

“You know, I can say it in all hands, then it's a one and done. But as new people enter the company and onboard as people are trying to get up to speed on where we're going, they have one place to go.”

“We became a public company, and so we had to introduce something our legal team noted as a safe framework. Please don't ask me what it stands for. You can Google it because I don't remember, but it's basically understanding if this is financial information, it…”

“We never have a meeting without a meeting agenda and it's by default. We always make it open to the company if possible.”

“Anybody at the company, I think you have to be here for a certain amount of time can apply to shadow him for two weeks. And when you shadow Sid, you go to one-on-one. So he, they would come to a one-on-one with me. It's kind of funny. It's like me and him talk…”

“We don't really like to present, and so we really try to pre-send materials to make the most effective meetings, not sit there and present slide after slide in a meeting. We assume everybody is pre-read, then we can just jump into rich conversation.”

“And the thing we stand really true to is I never have wanted, and I know the team would agree with me, just One bad instance, one bad actor to spoil it for everybody else. So while we have had these things happen and every company has, it's not like we're like…”

“Which, what CTO wants to talk to the CMO of DevSecOps? Like my platform, but they definitely want to talk to somebody that is working on understanding their needs. That was a former customer and that wants to come back with a team and understand, are we strate…”

“Multi-billion dollar company. Public now. Incredibly successful. They don't do meetings at all. I have a couple thousand people. They don't do meetings.”

“And the usage product usage is the, almost like the leading indicator for success for PLG versus in the sales funnel. It's like almost like how many do you get and do they interact with the marketing campaigns, right?”

“And then the other potential conversion path is where the product usage is high, but also this customer, this potential prospect fits into your ideal customer profile, right? It's a, from a fortune, 500 company, or it's from a target industry that, you know, t…”

“So at GitLab, we actually did a bunch of analysis. We're trying to understand what is that moment for our new users. We ended up have something along the line of two users, two features used in the first 14 days.”