YouSaid · the spoken record

David DeSanto

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105
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2024-04-14
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2024-04-14
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  1. “Everyone, as well as maybe contribute to the code. It can be as simple as fixing a small bug to adding a new feature. Some of our favorite features are ones that others have contributed outside of GitLab.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “If you want to follow along with GitLab where At GitLab, I'm basically every social, so go to any social media, you can find us. For me personally, I'm Desanto on LinkedIn. You just search for David DeSanto. I should come up. I'm David underscore DeSanto on X. And as I mentioned earlier, I am David the Beard on Threads. I'm also trying to make Blue Sky a thing for me. So if you want to catch me, I'm just Didasanto on Blue Sky. And then how listeners can really help? There's really two things. Like one, please share feedback with GitLab, with my team. You can go and comment on our issues or ethics, our tasks. It's all public. So flip things up, give us feedback. That's always very helpful. Just go to gitlab.com and you can see our code base. And then if you are someone who wants to contribute, like please open up a merge request, improve the handbook. Companies fork that handbook and then use it for their sales as well. So you're not just helping GitLab, you're helping.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I was back as an engineering director was, you know, it's just software. So anything's possible. You know, a lot of times someone will say, well, I can't really do that. It's like, well, but it is just software. It hasn't been done yet, but it's doable.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I actually have like two or three. I'll save them quickly for everyone. But the first is as a leader, my first one is your team's accomplishments are theirs, but their failures and misses are yours. And I early on in my career would have loved to feel like sometimes like my work wasn't just then praises for my manager. And as now a leader of a very large team at GitLab, it's been important. The one that my team laughs at that I say a lot is as a general motto, like I'll go just make it work. And people who are listening to your podcast might realize that's a Tim Gunn saying from Project Runway. And it was kind of like my way of taking on the work, the problem statement, and making it a little bit more like, okay, this is the thing you have to figure out, like make it work. Like, what does that mean for you? And so it also lets me throw in pop culture too. And the last one, and I'll say I came up with this when.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think it's actually hit the point where it's hit its end of life, but it was revolutionary for news. I thought it was fantastic. The things I use that are not the app that just went away, that's a little bit bad about. I've really gotten a love for superhuman for email. It's really allowed me to make where Google Workspace customer like more powerful. And most recently, I just started using the Arc browser from the browser company. I think it's fantastic. I like how it organizes everything and archives tabs that they've been inactive for too long and all these things that I think just took me from a single Chrome window to like five Chrome windows each with 100 tabs and has made me more effective.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, so I won't say there's a specific question. It's so much a method. So I really like the star method for asking questions. If people aren't familiar with it, Google it. It's really powerful. And then how I then apply it to be my favorite question, depending if it's PM or it's someone in engineering or department is giving them a scenario where there's a little bit of conflict or tension and having them work through that as an example. I think those really kind of give you a sense as to how people can problem solve.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The most recent TV show I really like, The Devil's Hour. It's a BBC show. If you've not seen it and you like sci-fi crossed with like, I don't know, we'll call it like a mystery criminal type show. It's really, really good. Movie-wise, it's an older movie. My wife and I just watched The Glass Onion. Really liked it. And then there might be a little bit of a Swifty in me. And we watched the Arrows tour when it came available to watch. Also was phenomenal. can't believe three and a half hours went by as quickly as it did.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think it was a class he created, and it turned into a Chapter two in one of his books. I don't remember which book it's in them.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “The two that I probably recommend the most are Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Moore. The current edition still has some things that are a little bit older now as examples, but the core of it is still very, very amazing. The other one is essentialism. And that is really about saying no to the right things and finding the thing that you really need to do to get the job done. And then not a book, but Jeffrey Moore created this. There's the critical core context framework. And if you've read both of What is the critical part for your business? What is the core of the expectation? And what are the things that you can say no to with the little amount of risk? So those things together, I think are really powerful.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Residual planning solution and then take that from idea all the way to running in production and then learn from that and bring it back into the life cycle. But I'll take your feedback to marketing and say I was just on an amazing podcast, met a great guy hopefully get to talk again in the future. And he just, he said, I can't come back until the website's better. So can you please? Just make it a little bit clearer.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “We do everything across the software development lifecycle. Some areas are really strong. Those key areas are SCM, code review, what would be called the create stage in the tool chain. CICD, we're industry leading there as well. Security and compliance. So we can do application security scanning. We can do things like software bill of materials and traceability and all the things that go around compliance and governance. And then, of course, we also have monitoring, whether that is value stream management and analytics. We can now do product analytics so you can have GitLab embed telemetry and then see how that app is being used. And we are currently working on expanding into observability and service management. But it is truly an amazing experience if you start with just an idea in our planning functionality. Again, been awarded a leading enterprise.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “No one's going to want a platform. They want a bunch of point solutions and customers end up with 75 tools to try to deliver software and they adopt GitLab and all of a sudden they realize how much more effective they can be in collaboration. And even that transparency stuff we talked at the beginning.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The big thing I just like to let people know if you're not familiar with GitLab or you haven't heard of GitLab in a couple of years go check out our website. We do everything across the software development lifecycle. You know, when I started in 2019, I was hired at compliance and security to DevOps, which has made us a DevSecOps platform. And now we've gone from not just source code management and code review or CICD, but true security and governance. That includes things like our remote development offering where now you can even get developers up and running in minutes on a software project or enterprise agile planning capabilities. And of course, GitLab Duo. You know, we've heard from customers. They've seen efficiency boosts of 50% and above by leveraging GitLab Duo. And I would say if you've not heard from us in a while or aren't as familiar, like please just check that out because we are truly unique in the space. And it's something I take a lot of pride in. You know, people said.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Is there a value part of my tool belt now? Like a tool on my tool belt. And I'm glad she appreciates it. Not every joke lands, which I'm sure you're not surprised by that, right?”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I'll take the compliment from Hilo. What I learned early in my career is that tension, especially very like high, very tension-driven conversations, can really kill productivity, kill morale. And that I found that if I can deflate that a little bit and kind of re-add some, I don't want to say humanity to the conversation, but really disarm the topic that people are able to move forward. And I think that's what she's talking about. I will say that it probably is partially David being David to a degree. Maybe I'm leveraging the class clown experience of my elementary and high school experience and harnessing it for good now. But I think people can also do that and leaders who have seen me do that, like Gila have learned that there's ways to do that if you can read the room and the nuance and know whether or not it's okay to try to add a little bit of levity. But”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's also about meeting those tenants, right? And so our partners at their commercial, they need to meet that same requirement, that same vision. And both Google as in Google Cloud and Anthropic were able to meet the privacy requirements we had. And those are really important to us, right? And so not every company that we could partner with could do that. And so we had to be very careful as to who we partnered with. And so there's nothing about the companies we're not partnered with. Maybe we just haven't gone to that point yet, right? But that's part of being a partner is you have to meet those same values for lack of put it that we have base of our customer base, especially being trusted by more than 50% of the Fortune 100.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, and then we actually acquired a company at the beginning of 2021 or 2022 named Unreview. And we have those models. Those are the ones that would be GitLab proprietary. And then we do use open source as well. We're actually looking at how we can leverage open source more and contribute back there. We have a really awesome AI model validation team. There are a bunch of AI researchers that have studied things like ethical AI and AI at scale. And that's allowing us to select the right model.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's both GitLab created open source and commercial. Today, we've partnered with both Google And anthropic. And those were the commercial models come from”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “As you are for code generation, which is sharing blocks of code, you're going to have a much different user experience. The things that generate blocks of code like functions, those actually take a while to run. They take seconds, sometimes 20, 30 seconds to fully respond. If you're just asking for the next couple lines to be completed, you're not going to wait that long. And so you've got to have something that can handle that as well. And so we've done that. And I encourage everyone else to do that. If you go to the gitlab docs website, you can select git lab do and you'll see all the models we're using. And you can start to understand as you learn about those models, you start to see why we chose them. And it actually has allowed us to get closer and closer to that 10x that we're wanting to get our customers to.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “What I would say is we spend, and this is really the third tenet, is finding the right model for the right use case. And good, I point that out. Your question reminded me of it. 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 they make everything fit into it. And what you end up doing is actually reducing the quality that someone can experience with that feature that's leveraged by AI. And so I encourage people to find the right model for the use case. We have around 16 models we use today to make GitLab have its AI suite, which is called GitLab Duo. And we've done that to say like, hey, this one's really good at explaining and resolving vulnerabilities. We're going to use that for that use case. This one's better at summarizing conversations and plan. Let's use that. And of course, like code creation is also an area where if you're using the same model for inline code completion.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “There was a boost in efficiency. GitLab Ultimate, our top tier, has a 7x boost on productivity from our customers doing a data analysis of their improvements. We want to take that to 10x as part of it. And so we think AI can give us that last little bit of a burst. Now, I did mention a minute ago, and maybe I'll stop there, see if you have questions on those. And then I just want to talk a little about where we're going with AIX. I think it's pretty exciting.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Transparent, which fits into our conversation earlier, right? And be focused on privacy with AI. And that means that we tell you what models we're using were source available so you can see how we're using them. We tell you how they're trained. And the privacy part is we don't use your intellectual property for training and fine-tuning models. Our models are trained on data that is not yours, which means that you don't have more safety in using that. I think other companies have shown why that's important with leaks of customer data and we want to avoid that. I think the thing that's interesting as a source available open core company, we're actually trusted by more than 50% of the Fortune 500 or Fortune 100. So if more than 50% of those top companies trust GitLab to secure their own intellectual property, we had to do that with AI as well. And then the last one was AI efficiencies. We wanted to make it so”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Would say we've taken a very unique approach to AI as part of software development. And the reason why we did that is that GitLab has a very unique position. We are a true DevSecOps platform. A lot of our competitors that people talk about are like a developer platform or developer experience type tool. And we know that if 25% of the SDLC is actually creating code, 75% is not. And we want to help all those people around the developer be successful. To do that, we kind of set ourselves like three core tenets or principles for AI a couple years ago. The first one was AI across the entire software development lifecycle. We want to help product managers, QA teams, ops teams, security teams also benefit from AI. You know, if you make your developer a hundred times more effective, it just means probably everything around them is going to break. And so to make them more effective, you've got to help everyone. The next was we wanted to be both”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, I'm sure as we grew, I joined 2019, company started years before that. And I've just seen the maturity of the company as a whole and the growth and the need to focus on going deep in some really core areas. But like I said, we still go back to that same approach that they have. It just depends on what we're talking about and why we would make that decision.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Are leading, and we see them as leading in the industry, it's going to give us the ability to do more of that breath over depth as we try to expand our SAM or try to go after a new market.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I mean, I know the company and know some people who worked with me in the past that have gone there. I think what you're touching on is that there's some product frameworks that are universal. I occasionally will have founders reach out and ask the question, when do I make that pivot? And it's really like, have you found your fit in the market? And have you done the whole, and we'll use like, you know, Jeffrey Mortar's book, The Crossing the Chasm, like have you found that? And if you have now you know to put all of your wood behind that arrow to use a saying, right? And then you're able to get that differentiation in that market presence. And we go back to breadth over depth when we're looking at new investments. So it's not like it's left GitLab. It's currently part of our AI strategy that we're finding the spots for DevSecOps for AI makes a lot of sense. But we also know that if those five things I shared with you,”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Start adding model ops functionality to GitLab in 2020. We focused heavily on adding depth to MLOps, which is just one of the three pillars of that. And we know that DataOps will probably be needed at some point. But if we have a nice integration with DataOps platforms, you can actually do all your MLOps work in GitLab and be successful at it with a lightweight connector or component that's there. And so that's what we've done is we've started really investing deep in those key areas. knowing that it's going to help those areas that we aren't investing necessarily as much in be still good enough and kind of touch on what you're touching on earlier about the getting to that good enough level”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, and for those who are as familiar with GitLab as I know you are like we are the leader in our space, we are the DevSecOps platform, not just us calling that, but user reviews, analysts like Gardner and Forrester are calling that out. And so what for us it was, was that I think when you're going really wide, you're trying to find your niche and like what you're going to be really good at and what you can differentiate on. And for us, what that was is where are the key areas that we can truly help someone accelerate delivering software. And over the course of those years, you're right. We're still in a fast growth period when I started. And I was part of that breath first when I started in 2019, but we found those key areas that we know if they are truly deep, they bridge to the other area that's deep. And maybe some of those areas have to be as deep as the things around them. And so a good example is, you know, we”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “ID experience, remote development, CI, CD, security and governance, planning, and AI. We know those are really deep, the things that aren't as deep around them. We'll get that like a rising tide of solates effect. And so we've pivoted and those queries now be depth over breadth.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think they are. I think that's a whole other. Another podcast on why that is. So he was right. So when she started in 2019, a couple months after me, we were very much focused on a breath over depth. And that was so we could build out what is the DevSecOps platform. The only way that we could truly help people from a platform strategy was be touching the different parts of the DevSecOps lifecycle or the SDLC, depending how you look at it. 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.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So I did. I love Hila, by the way. I worked with her for about It was a little over two years, I think the time she was here. Still talk to her occasionally over LinkedIn Messenger. Someone asked me if LinkedIn was dead, by the way. I think it's how I stay in touch with former colleagues.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “That's not just true for me. That's true for the gentleman I mentioned who's in Germany. We had an employee who is in Israel in the leadership team. We've had PMs, New York's designers, technical writers, York's researchers all over. And that's not just true for product, it's true for every division at GitLab.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “The best summary of the conversation is make sure you're focused on communication being clear, setting the clear steps, like a framework for how to operate and be uncomfortable with the transparency to make sure people can follow along. And if you're doing those things right, remote is actually really great. I can't tell you how I feel today in a measurement that's not just like I'm really happy about it, but like I just felt like other places I've worked where we had to hire to an office, it really limited the candidate pool you could have. And now being all remote, we can hire anywhere for the most part and find the best person for the role. And that's allowed people to have the life they want. I don't live in the Bay Area anymore. And I think it's phenomenal. I'm your family and friends that I grew up with and I can still work that tech job.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I don't think anyone's thinking of that yet, though maybe they are. They have actually focused on how do you make a version of David who's in every meeting Playing with some of the AI generated stuff, training it on videos that I did. So we have a lot of fun at GitLab, but we also accomplish a lot too, is the takeaway from that.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “The west coast of the United States will take that call and they're empowered to do that. And so that's how we kind of deal with it. We are in 60 countries or over 60 countries at this point We've had to be very careful to be inclusive. And that's what drives those things well known taking recorded meetings, that asynchronous focus on communication.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And so that means that he may not be online when parts of his team are online, but 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. I had a leader in our team who was in Tel Aviv. At that point, I still lived in the middle of the United States. We had a half hour overlap in our day. She was always highly efficient as a leader. And her team was also geographically dispersed. And they were highly effective. And to kind of give you the way I've looked at it, it means that you can empower the people around you so that you don't have to worry about those meetings that happen at weird times of the day for you. A good example of if I can't make it to a leader or meeting that is more APAC time-friendly, because maybe that's where a lot of the team members are, I have leaders.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Is a good question. So we focus on asynchronous communication first. And so that means that key decisions that involve people who are in a time zone where the meeting is not occurring that waits until they're back online because they're the directly responsible individual or DRIs we say here. We also focus on making sure the meetings that do happen are optional and are both recorded as we talked about the beginning, but also have really good notes. And so that way someone who's in a different time zone can read that and consume that when they're online. Our goal is to make sure we're as inclusive as possible. And so that includes even leadership roles. Our leader of our product portfolio for our SaaS platforms, which are gitlab.com and gitlab dedicated, he lives in Germany, but he's a leader at GitLab, right? And his product team is in the US. I think he's got someone in South America, people in Western Europe and so forth.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “What we have encouraged people to do is create their own mini versions of these things because like I want to provide guidance. I don't want to give you direction. And what I mean by that is like here's how I'd like you to prioritize. Here are the important things for the company. But whether you make that one milestone is 100% new feature. Long as you're achieving the outcome that we've said, how you get there is your own decision, and then those individual teams create their own mini version and references back to the bigger handbook.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Exactly how we're going to operate for a milestone, that iteration again, where, hey, what's expected three weeks before, two weeks before from you? And then that allows some of those values we talked about earlier to come into effect because now you've also had your EM on the other side who also has something similar and knows when to expect something from you, when not to expect it from you. But then if there are bigger changes, we of course have processes for those that are defined. Great examples if you're going to introduce a new category, which new part of the product requires my sign off to do that, right? If you're going to change that product development framework that helps you prioritize, that's going to be approved by myself, the CTO, as well as a lot of our directs that are involved in making sure we're delivering efficiently. And so it can all be from a team perspective to a global wide that you can contribute to.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Yeah, so we talked about a little bit about single sources of truth earlier. And one of those is the handbook for us. It's how the company operates. And so if you're finding something that's inefficient in a workflow or you're finding something is unclear, you're encouraged, even as part of your onboarding to open up a merge request and make it right. And we sometimes make jokes in the product division because when product managers are onboarding, the handbook feels like the product. And their three-week of onboarding, they may end up opening a bunch of merger requests for things. Like I found this typo, I fixed it or the sentence could have been worded better. So I reworded it. Now it makes more sense, right? But then there's also the bigger things. So our product development lifecycle and that workflow and the framework that supports it is all in the handbook and it's in the public handbook. And so what that allows people to do is understand”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Yeah, it does. If you have your notifications set up, any comment on something that you created will give you a new notification. The notification shows up in your to-do list in GitLab. You can have it send you an email. I have it actually email me and it goes into a folder. Actually created, we use Google Workspace. And if it's a you've been mentioned to do, it goes into one like or gets one Git or Gmail label if it's a, hey, this was an issue that you're following that there's been activity on that goes into a different label. And that way I can quickly find the ones that I should be responding to.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “use git lab is very anti email A lot of ways, obviously, use it for external communication, but internally, it's on an issue, it's in Slack, or it goes into the handbook, right? So like if we've made a decision together, whatever you and I were going back and forth on, we think this is really important. We go update that part of the handbook or add a new handbook page or whatever needs to happen so everyone can benefit from it.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I'm going to be biased here and say GitLab as a product. We call it dog fooding, but we use it for everything we do. And that's become key because it makes sure that the product we're shipping is going to work for our customer and our end user. But our policy here is like, hey, if you have the idea, like open an issue and then tag your team. And then that issue becomes that single source of truth. And we can then turn that into an epic or if it's going to become work for the engineering team, it can be converted into one of those types of issues. And we do it that way. We also encourage people to use Zoom. If you have too many back and forth, so like say like Lenny, you asked me a question. I answer it and you go up, but I understand like you ask it a different way. And then I answer it again. You're still confused, like practically reach out and get on Zoom because maybe it's just something in writing's not translating. And so between those three main communication tools, that's what.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Does and I think it also kind of feeds back into those remote work items as well, that it's actually good for you to overcommunicate. It's actually good for you to focus on is the outcome happening. Because you may end up in a situation where the outcome felt like it was really big, but three days into your one month long iteration, which we have here, all of a sudden you realize like this can be knocked down a week, right? Well, now don't just wait, reach back out and say like, hey, this is dumb. Like what's the next thing?”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Ask a question on that issue or on the merger cluster, or send a Slack message right away. The last thing you want to do is have a 24-hour 48, 72 hour cycle go by and a developer, your engineering manager is stuck. Or, you know, they've asked you a question and now you're leaving them kind of hanging and not getting the answer they need. And that's where to your point, used to block up to a cubicle taps on the show and be like, hey, what's going on? And now it's got to do that digitally. And that is reach out on the communication platform. We use Slack. It's like reach out on Slack or comment on the GitLab issue or merger quest.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Like, this is a weird step. I'm coming in as a director at the company. And then I finished it and it was like, this is the best experience I think I've had. Like this has the standard of interview process. And so All ties together is that first thing. The second thing I tell everyone is don't wait. Like if you're concerned or learning something is going off the rails or you just want to know something's on track, like don't wait until your next check-in point, whether that's a lot of teams here do a once a week stand up.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “So it's actually, they can write requirements for anyone. Requirements written up as part of the entry process, so like one candidate, their topic was they chose bicycles. And so it's like you're going to ship a new bicycle then. Like, what's the epic, like the higher level vision and like what's the first milestone for us milestones or releases? But like that first iteration, what is the MBC for that or minimum viable change towards it? And that then they create that after having like an hour Zoom call with the person who's going to do it with them talking through it some they then go write those things and they engage with that person. It's always someone in Prague. We don't pull our engineering team in to do it. But the last a follow-up question on the issue and then let them rewrite something in the issue or the Laska question, maybe that causes them to find something better. And I personally, when I was interviewing, thought”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Interview process correct. And then it also gives them the opportunity to decide can they actually do it. And we've had candidates go like, you know, this wasn't for me. And so. That's the first thing is like writing real concise requirements is really key.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “There's probably two or three points I would make. The first is if you're in an all remote world, your requirements have to be clear. You know, sometimes you can get away with, hey, I have a daily standup or a couple weeks stand up. And then you use that as the opportunity to clarify something. You have to get it written right the first time or at least refined before you expect someone to work on it. And so as part of the interview process of 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. And it really helps both us see whether or not the person has the potential to be able to work in that type of environment.”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, I mean, I've now been doing it for a while. I can't imagine not being in product. And so I'm glad I made the change. And I've not looked back”

    2024-04-14 · Lenny's Podcast · The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source