GitLab CPO David DeSanto responds to Lenny Rachitsky asking if GitLab is the largest all-remote company in the world.
Insight
Transparency is easier than secrecy because tracking internal communication creates overhead
“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…”
Insight
Product managers are likely succeeding if cross-functional stakeholders are annoyed
“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.”
Insight
Remote teams can operate successfully with zero working-hour overlap via asynchronous communication
“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.”
Insight
Forcing all product features into a single LLM reduces overall feature quality
“What sometimes people will do is they go, oh, there's this really popular, large language model, whether that's a commercial or open source, and then they make everything fit into it. And what you end up doing is actually reducing the quality that someone can …”
Disclosure
GitLab encourages employees to livestream internal team meetings to YouTube
“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.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Open-source developers contribute code to GitLab after watching public meeting videos
“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 …”