YouSaid · the spoken record

David DeSanto

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2024-04-14
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2024-04-14
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  1. “That is, think about what all those requests together really mean, and then do that and not take the orders. And so that's kind of the advice I give is like, Not the big sexy role that everyone talks about, it's actually a lot of work, a lot of discussion sometimes tension and lead with the customer first and the use case and the pain point and then everything else will kind of fall in behind that.”

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

  2. “I'm very transparent that product is not necessarily the rock star role that people think it is. You know, the way I tell people who are doing their career, maybe they're now an associate 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. Product is the like the hub in the middle of the wheel and the spokes or engineering marketing, sales, legal and so forth. They can't do your job unless you're properly leading. You're pushing the boundary and they're all kind of getting a little like are you really sure that's what you want to do or wow that seems like a lot of work or huh, I hadn't thought about it like that. Like you're probably doing your job well. And what I encourage them to do is think outside the box, not focus on the, I call it like order taker or like deli counter worker in the US where like everyone gets a number and you just fill.”

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

  3. “And I love it now. I can't imagine not doing it. I like to look back at that time when Gitlab made the offer to have me come in and start leading a part of the product division. And my wife saying, you're going to love this. I don't know why you're questioning it. So listen to your friends, your family, your partner, they can also help you with that sort of decision.”

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

  4. “Probably the top topics that people reach out to me for. The first is how did you get into product? Because my background, I started as a software developer, had my own company sold it for all those listening just enough to pay off its bills. It was not like I'm independently wealthy now. And moved into security research and eventually into product. And it's like, how did you make that leap? How did you know it was the right thing for you? Next topic is the I see GitLab has this very transparent handbook and this GitLab unfiltered channel. Like what? Like how did this happen? Why are you doing it? And then the last one's usually, how do I know remote development is for me? And I make the jump. And I talk about myself and my time in the office versus not in the office and the things for me, I was very transparent with the team when I started in 2019 that I'm like, this makes me a little freaked out. I'm not sure this is going to be the thing for me.”

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

  5. “Do with that. And by the way, I think that's the biggest challenge for people who move from a different role into a product division or product role is changing that dynamic to not be like the bits and the bytes, but be the use case, the pain point. Because sometimes you actually don't need to ship a new feature per se. Sometimes you just have to make it more usable. And then all of a sudden, you're getting the outcome you're looking for.”

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

  6. “Fixing a bug is kind of like it's more of a deliverable than like a And so we try to make them things like we want to have 60% of our customer base using this part of the portfolio. Now, what do we do to get there? And that allows people then to have a measurable outcome that does tie back to how many hours they're working to a degree, right? Because you're scoping it, but it's not about the ship 20 features next month that could take you more than a month, that could take you a day and a half if you break down your feature into tiny little features, right? Whereas it's more like celebrate the adoption, not the shipping. And I think that's really where we've tried to move. GitLab as a company has always been very focused on how fast we ship software, but that's not really how our customers use it. It's more about what pain point or use case did we solve. And if you're now framing it in that way, you begin to move away from the deliverable and the hours and you get into the did the customer adopt it? What was their outcome? Like what success did they have? What are you trying to?”

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

  7. “People who finally get to meet each other and make that human connection. I think when someone gets to do that, it makes Zoom feel a little less scary because you've actually seen and maybe hugged or shook the hand of that other person. And now you've got that same human connection that you may not otherwise get if you just never saw your coworkers in person.”

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

  8. “The best way to put is, you know, my, I have an executive coach. He's a great guy. One thing he said was that if you think you're communicating 100% accurately, that's probably 60 or 70% for the other person and shoot for like 150%. And so that's something that I think really helps in that environment. And then lastly, and we just talked about this, is making time for in-person events. I have my leadership team get together every quarter. Every other quarter of that, we bring in our director plus group and we're actually doing that next month. Last time we did it was in October. And see if you can find ways to get more part of the team together. I just shared we're having our first company-wide get together since the pandemic. But that doesn't mean that we had to wait that long. I got the product division, 140 of us together across two different cities over the course of a month to allow.”

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

  9. “Yeah, I think there's a handful of things that I really encourage people, which, by the way, I do get reach outs on, it's now called X, LinkedIn, where someone will say, I've read this in the product handbook, but I don't understand how this then applies in all remote environments. And so I usually kind of say like, if you're looking at being a remote first culture, there's a couple things you just need to understand and focus on. Things like be transparent. We've talked about that a bunch already. Focus on results, not ours. Sometimes people get fixated on the, well, did you work the full 40 hours this week or wow, you worked more than 40 hours this week? Like what's going on? And instead, it should be about, hey, we've agreed to an outcome and how we achieved that outcome. I think over communication is also key that I share with people.”

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

  10. “We were pre the pandemic when we were around 1,100 people. I think if everyone now having recalls back to the office, we might be back to being the largest all remote. I've not seen a number yet from other companies how much are they still remote? But I was during the pandemic, I think like a Google and Apple would win as the largest all remote, right? Whereas now those people are coming back to the office, we might be back to being the largest.”

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

  11. “Enjoying the all remote. I'll call it lifestyle because it is an adjustment to how your day goes and how you engage and all that sort of thing.”

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

  12. “The thing for them is that they just don't feel connected the way they want to be connected. I'll be honest, I started at GitLab a couple months before the pandemic. And so for me, I got to attend to our sales kickoff, but that was only a third of the company. And it's not until actually in March this year that we're doing our first company-wide get-together where I'm going to get to meet some people I've never had the chance to meet in the four and a half years I've been here. And so I myself found that a little jarring initially. I worked in a company that had a hybrid model and I knew what that was like to have people not with you. But the fact that like that human connection can be missed more so for some people than others. And I think that's really what it comes down to. Yeah, you're right. They could not understand the technology. Maybe they're not fitting into the role. But I think sometimes it's also, I just, I'm not.”

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

  13. “So I think it really kind of dozed 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 underperformer, but they're missing that in office every day feeling maybe in some cases they just want to get out more and be not at their home or at the same co-working space all the time. And so for them That's really the thing that's the”

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

  14. “Yeah. And by the way, we also put, that's all the way down to the group level. So on our marketing site, if you go to like about.gitlab.com again slash direction under direction is the product direction that we've set for the next year. And then that links out to those stages and groups. So you can really follow along. And when you get lower into that, like to the group level, they're linking to their epics, their issues, and their tasks in our issue tracker so you can easily find them. We have, I think, 72,000 open issues right now in our backlog and be hard to dig through all of that. It's people creating new ones, customers commenting on it just keeps the backlog really large, but you can go through that marketing site that we have and get to the thing you're actually interested in reading about.”

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

  15. “Those have stages in them that map the DevOps toolchain, like create, plan, monitor, verify. And then those have groups in them. And those groups are that lowest group I'm talking about where we pushed on the priority. And those will be the things that have our categories. So there's a group that's called environments that manages our Kubernetes integration, our deployment dashboard, and so forth. And that, of course, then all feeds back up to that top level vision. And so it's allowed us to be structured in a way that helps us ensure that the people who need to work closely together can across those groups. And allows us to tie stages together to make sure we're hitting the outcomes that we need. And so that kind of is how that all then fits together. There's like a group direction. There's a stage and section strategy and there's companies longer term vision and then mission.”

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

  16. “Get there the way they think we need to get there for their area or a new area that needs to be created. For those who are not as familiar with GitLab, we're structured by sections. Those are areas like dev”

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

  17. “The thing is to make sure we're always going towards where we think our customers are going to need. And so to give you an example, the three-year strategy says our goals become the first all-ops platform. And that essentially say that we want to be the single source of truth for R&D organizations. And that's not just the people who are in R&D, like product, UX, engineering infrastructure, but for the teams that work around them, including legal, sales, product marketing, compliance, and so forth. And so for us, all ops means it's everything that's needed to do that. And that's what we've built not just source code management and code review and so forth, or CI CD. We've added security and compliance. We've added enterprise agile planning. We're even starting to add service desk, service management functionality in GitLab as well. And so for us, that's our long-term goal. And then we empower the teams to”

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

  18. “Yeah, we have on the website up to, I think, a 30 year mission. So it's, yeah, we have our mission. We have our vision. We have our strategy, and we have our direction. Those are the levels of which we plan.”

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

  19. “And I think those two things together on top of what we talked about the transparency and the collaboration really help us be who we are today.”

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

  20. “Software should faster, make their software more secure, give them better visibility to its usage. And having that focus on the customer is the number one thing. It allows us to be a lot more empathetic with not only our customers, but the broader community. And efficiency is really about how do you get work done. And we try to drive responsibility down to the lowest level in the organization. I as the leader of product will set a three-year, seven-year strategy. But like how we get there, we leave up to the individual teams. And that empowers them to be able to work efficiently and hit that high level of velocity that we talked about at the beginning of our chat. And so I think for me, those things kind of come together. It's okay to ship something that you think is good, but maybe it's not great yet. Get it out there, get that flywheel working so you get the feedback from the customer and then iterate on it.”

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

  21. “I think for me, it's the results and the efficiency ones that always hop out for me. And results is focused on results for customers. And that's why we do everything we do. And almost any company that's really the case. And so how do we help our customer get.”

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

  22. “This is the happiest I've been in my career. It has nothing to do with my success at GitLab, though I'm sure that's part of it, but it's also I know that we're all working together for the common good. We're all trying to aspire those values and it makes it a great place to work. And it's been the happiest I've been. And I've been here four and a half years.”

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

  23. “Our approach was to take the other side of the move fast and break things. It's more about building that community, that trust and everyone hitting the results together.”

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

  24. “It does. And part of that ties back to those other values, right? You aren't your work, right? So if someone's reaching over and doing something in your space, that's where if you have long toes, as they're called, you feel like people are stepping on you. Whereas if you had short toes, it's about contributing 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

  25. “So, the short toes is, you know, it's really 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 as someone trying to help you make it better and not a personal view of how you are as a person or as an employee. And so like a great example would be I make videos occasionally and post them on Slack and people can consume them. Those are not always well received. I don't take that personally. I take it as an opportunity to say what could have made this video better so the next time I do it, it provides a lot more value. And I think that is really where that short toes comes in. It's about comment on the work, not the person. It's not look what you did. It's like this could have been better this way. And if you're assuming positive 10 having short toes, you end up having less head butting.”

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

  26. “Agree with you. I think you can be as transparent as we are without having our values. You can't be have our values unless you're trying to put it sometimes into the remote work environment and vice versa. And I think they all fit really well together. And it's been the company continuing to grow and adapt them as we've gone from, again, like one person to over 2000.”

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

  27. “Engagement that you really want to have where people are working together collaboratively and assuming positive intent and so forth. But I will tell you the negative is one-on-one that you mentioned. Like that one's actually really important to me because 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 got to 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 positive intent because negative feedback should be one-on-one.”

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

  28. “Yeah, by the way, for those who aren't looking at the values and go to about.gitlab.com slash values and you can see them. But what I will share with you is that we have a thanks channel where people just post a thank you note whenever they are truly thankful for something. And that channel is constantly getting those messages in. It's reinforcing that.”

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

  29. “But that's not the case for everyone at GitLab, right? And same thing with other teams. And sometimes it's hard to assume what the person's intention actually is. And so we say, be kind, assume the positive intent, realize that everyone's here to help each other out. And I can tell you when people ask me, what's it like working at GitLab? I always kind of come back to the values and say we actually live them. And that starts with Sid all the way down the organization to a brand new employee straight off college. If we're doing that, then there's a lot less of that tension and headbudding that can happen in organizations, especially when we don't see each other all the time in person.”

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

  30. “The values really come together in a way that I've not seen other company values come together. And I don't remember where these all are in there, but it ties into the kindness. If you're all remote, you're not necessarily seeing people in person. And sometimes it's hard to read intent on a Slack message or the emotion in the message. And so we say assume positive intent, assume the person is traditionally just asking for help or is trying to be helpful. you know, have short toes, like don't read something and think it's meant a different way. And that's where like the kindness comes in as well is that if you're treating each other with kindness and assuming positive intent, you end up with a lot less of the negative headbudding you can have, especially in an asynchronous culture like GitLab. You know, our team, I will see my direct”

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

  31. “I mean, I would say that if you're in tech and you're building a product regardless if you're a developer platform or a DevSecOps platform like us, I think there has benefit. I think Salesforce could have a little bit more engagement from a broader customer base, right? My last employer, we started sharing the list of open requests for new features more externally. And we got a much more honed-in roadmap. And that led to better customer engagement, which led to a higher retention rate, which led to better expansion numbers, right? So I think it's about what's right for your business and not necessarily, are you in column A or column B?”

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

  32. “But I would say that there's still a balance where there's probably something you can be more transparent about. I'm even seeing in heavily regulated industries where they're starting to publish more of the roadmap externally as a way to build more trust with their users and their customers because now they know where you're going and it's not a cloak and dagger type feeling. And so I will admit it can't be done everywhere, but I think it can be done a lot more than done today. You get a community feedback loop, which is great, especially when being in a product division”

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

  33. “Yeah, I mean, for me, it really comes down to the engagement we can get externally. Because, is your trackers public, our customers comment on it? We get community contributors committing to our code base and helping GitLab be a better product. I can see where in certain industries we'll say like financial services, maybe you can't do that as much.”

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

  34. “Find out that it's actually a lot easier to be transparent than this to not be transparent because 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 becomes that that's a lot of data that people can consume and then they can make informed decisions quicker because they're not being siloed out of the conversation.”

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

  35. “Yeah, so I would say the big thing I've seen is focus on results, especially for our customers. We are a global company. We weren't always as big as we are, but GitLab is over 2,000 people. It allows people to asynchronously consume what happened while they were offline. And it gives them both more engagement as well as that lack of feeling of like FOMO or fear of missing out. To me, those are really the top level items that come out of it. The secondary benefits of those are, of course, team still better aligned. You find things that you may not find until the end of a software release or beginning of a go-to-market campaign. You have to reduce something. And so I just think really, and I say this with encouragement to people, pick one project and try it. And if that's successful and doesn't feel like a lot of additional work, try it with another one. And before you know, you might.”

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

  36. “Readout so you can post on Slack that are just saying, like, hey, here's everything that happened this week for the team. And then you'll solely find that if you're doing it, others start doing it. And before you know it, you've actually achieved a high level of transparency. Now, depending on the industry you're in, maybe you can't make your issue tracker public. If you're like GitLab and you're using GitLab.com, maybe you can share the details we share about customer meetings and are conversations with them obviously without saying their name. You'll find the right balance for you. And I think you'll truly find that as a company you become more productive.”

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

  37. “That's a great question. So, I think if you go back to the like, you have to push yourself to your uncomfortable, sometimes ends up being overly transparent and 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. And those are just pain points and learning. as long as you reinforcing that learning across the team, you end up not making that same mistake again. And I will say that I think the risk that that occasionally happening is way below the value of actually pushing yourself to do it. So what I would encourage you to do is start as simple as publishing a team meeting and making that available for everyone in the company begin to go from there to maybe like weekly meetings or even asynchronous.”

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

  38. “Your voice deeper. There you go. What ends up happening for us like coffee chat is like the equivalent of like walking in and running someone in a kitchen. So you're getting more coffee or tea or water, right? And so sometimes those just end up getting recorded because there's something that's a good nugget of information that comes out of it. And so realistically, like you just have to push yourself. It almost has to be uncomfortable. And then you realize you're starting to really truly be transparent and you're allowing everyone to contribute.”

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

  39. “I think it is pushing yourself to realize what is actually confidential and what actually is not confidential. Other places I've worked, there end up with these artificial silos, even if you're all in the same office. And that ends up impacting your ability to truly collaborate and get the results you're looking for. And I can give you a great example that sometimes you have a program manager or program management team who's tracking the schedule and now they're being forced to be the router between teams as opposed to say it's all stored in a single source of truth. Anyone can comment on it. Anyone can contribute to it. And that starts all the way from like team meetings, whether it's my leadership team or it goes all the way down to coffee chats that we have where sometimes people just record that chat because all of a sudden there's something really interesting in that. And for those listening or watching us, as you said,”

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

  40. “These numbers, but these are real numbers for us. 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 essentially every month for the last little over 12 years.”

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

  41. “Yeah, I think you're touching on actually my when I interviewed in 2019, I actually asked Sid, our co-founder and CEO a similar question. I said, hey, and I came from security into GitLab. And I said like, hey, we don't share more than four or six weeks with a roadmap with customers and even sales because we were in the situation where we didn't want our great idea to be taken and built before we built it. And then it happened to me at other places I've worked. And so what we in that conversation with him, he basically said, you know, it's product's job to be ambitious and it's engineering's job to meet that ambition. And if you think of it that way and it's that collaboration between the two, it becomes less scary to put the information out. But you are right. We're very even transparent there. The thing that gets into what you mentioned, the ability to ship software, I'm floored by.”

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

  42. “To do it. And I think those are all those things together have really allowed GitLob to be the most transparent publicly traded company in the world. And we're very proud of that because it's just in our DNA to do 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 think there's really two things. 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. And so whenever we do a call with a customer or I presented a conference or my team presents, we always say, hey, please go look at our issue tracker. And if there's something you like, vote it up. If there's something you want to see change, leave a comment. And I think that's unique to GitLab. I think we've actually caused other organizations to do something similar because of that. And the other one is our direction and our strategy mentioned earlier. Sometimes it's just a high level paragraph, but sometimes if you go deeper, we have like a one year direction that is very detailed and links over to our issue tracker to help you see like, hey, we're going to do, I don't know, we're going to build widget X and we're going to do that in the next six months and here's how we're going.”

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

  44. “I've been in this situation where I need to fix something or restart something or I'm the first person in the department and there's a lot of uplifting you have to do in that role. Whereas if you can leverage what GitLab has done, that's amazing, right? It really helps you continue forward really quickly”

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

  45. “It's great too, right? Like, I don't remember how many pages it is now, but it's huge. And so what I see what happens, and this kind of gets into the first example, I like we'll have companies who will fork the handbook because it's just source available too. At the bottom of the page, you can click view source. And I just heard from a company who's now becoming a customer who we're like, we want to redo our UX mission and how we operate in a UX department so we cloned the UX handbook within handbook.com.com and it became our baseline for building what we do. And you can see that even for startups who will say they've cloned the entire handbook and they use it as a way to start. And I think for me across my career,”

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

  46. “Yeah, it's up to the person and the team. So I do have a couple policies for the product division where we don't post the recording. We used to do live our, what we call our performance indicator reviews and key reviews. We stopped putting those public because we want to talk about the customer that's impacted or we want to talk about the thing that we need to move. And so we'll talk about it at a high level in our product division-wide meeting that is posted. But then like the nitty gritty like down details that would be considered material non-public information or Customer data that would need to be kept safe, those things, we will record those but keep those internal and not make them public”

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

  47. “Yeah, they'll hear about that. They'll look at the issue tracker because the issue tracker is all public. And they'll be like, oh, I can do that. Let me just do that and make the project better.”

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

  48. “And so we've had 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 a code commit. Or, you know, we'll get feedback on the video or feedback on social media. It's like, hey, I ran that same problem too. I'd love to hear how you solved it. And so I think it's been really great for not just the company, but the broader community, whether they're our paying customers or open source contributors.”

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

  49. “Where we kind of go over things we're working on, things we're excited about, troubles we're having, challenges in how we can work better together. I can tell you that it was a change joining GitLab in 2019 to have that much content just be available. You also learn how to be better on meetings because of it. My first meeting was like my first day and I spent a lot of time looking all over the room because I was used to being on like a WebEx where you can't see anything. So you could be looking outside while talking and all of a sudden you realize we're not really engaging because you're assuming it's like just an audio call. The great example I can give you is we get people who then contribute because of what they see.”

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

  50. “Yeah, so that's a great question. And you're actually correct. So about two years ago, we moved UX from engineering into product to make them a much more strategic part of the company. I knew a lot of UX, but didn't know everyone in UX. So we took the time to let me introduce myself to them if they weren't familiar with me or hadn't talked to me at all. But to your question, 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. So for those not familiar, you can search for GitLab unfiltered on YouTube. And there's more content there than a human being could watch in a single day or even everything that's recorded during the day. Because there can be multiple meetings happening at once that are also showing up there. But a good example of that is my bi-weekly product meeting.”

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