David DeSanto is the Chief Product Officer of GitLab. He explains how GitLab evolved its product development strategy after initially building wide coverage across the software development lifecycle.
“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 to coding, deploying, securing, monitoring the entire SDLC. And we now know there's key areas where we need to be really deep to help companies accelerate delivering software. And so in those key areas, they are source code management and the things around that, like code review, ID experience, remote development, CICD, security and governance, planning, And AI, we know if those are really deep, the things that aren't as deep around them, we'll get that like a rising tide lifts all boats effect. And so we've pivoted in those queries now be depth over breadth.”
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More from David DeSanto
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…”
David DeSantoApr 14, 2024▶ 19:21The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)
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.”
David DeSantoApr 14, 2024▶ 42:18The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)
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.”
David DeSantoApr 14, 2024▶ 54:20The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)
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 …”
David DeSantoApr 14, 2024▶ 1:06:58The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)
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.”
David DeSantoApr 14, 2024▶ 6:48The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)
AssertionNot 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 …”
David DeSantoApr 14, 2024▶ 8:03The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)
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