The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)

0:00 You guys share so many of the things that most people keep secret. You post videos of your team meetings on YouTube. We get people who then contribute because of what they see. Oh, I can go build that. I know what that is. Hey, I ran that same problem too. I'd love to hear how you solved it. You also have this handbook, how you onboard people, how count payable works at GitLab. We'll have companies who will force Work the handbook. If you can leverage what GitLab has done, that's amazing. You mentioned the value of short toes, which I was definitely gonna ask about. That's where if you have long toes, you feel like people are stepping on you. Whereas if you had short toes, it's about the work, it's not about you. You end with a lot less of the negative headbutting, especially in an asynchronous culture like GitLab. Is there any tips you could share with PMs that are just struggling in a remote world. If everyone's really annoyed at you, you're probably actually doing your job well. Today, my guest is David D Santo. David is the chief product officer at Git Lab.

0:54 Which is an incredibly unique company. It's the largest remote only company in the world. They share many of their team meetings on YouTube. And they've grown from being just a source code management business competing with GitHub to a multi-product platform that covers security, compliance, continuous integration, project management, deploy tools, and more, many of which are infused with AI magic. In our conversation, we dig into Git Lab's culture of transparency.

1:19 Including how they operationalize it, what they share publicly versus what they don't. The surprising benefits of working this way, and why it's worth considering going transparent with your organization. Also explore some of GitLab's other unicultural values, like kindness and having short toes. Plus, David shares a bunch of great advice for scaling remote work. Based on what's worked well at GitLab over the years.

1:42 Also, when it makes sense to go breadth over depth. Versus depth over breath. When launching new product lines and how it worked for GitLab over the years. This was a fascinating conversation, and if you want to learn more about a company that's doing things very differently, while also kicking a lot of ass. This episode is for you.

2:01 If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you David DeSanto, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Orb. As a business, you care about revenue, but as a product team, the last thing you want to do is delay a product launch or a pricing change because your team has to rebuild billing from scratch.

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4:07 Check out Epo at getEpo.com slash Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. Let's get EPPO. dot com slash Lenny David, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

4:24 Thank you for having me. Very excited about our chat. I'm very excited as well. You definitely win for uh best beard of any guest of the podcast so far. What does it take to maintain such a beard? That's a a great question. So I would tell you it's not as much as you think it would be. Um it's just

4:42 Regularly going to a barber you trust that can keep the shape and It does get washed and conditioned regularly'cause it you know, my hair Migrated south for the winter, never came back. And so you know, it's kinda become the staple. So yeah, comet Put conditioner in and things like that.

4:59 Not a lot of maintenance, surprisingly. Okay. And I think you mentioned offline your uh handle on is it on Twitter is uh what is it? Some Oh, so I I just started trying to use threads and threads, okay. Everywhere else I'm like Dee DeSanto or David DeSanto, those weren't available, so I'm David the Beard. David dot the dot beard. Amazing. You gonna all follow me there?

5:20 When do you watch this because, you know, I think I've got ten followers in the first couple of weeks here. We'd love to get it to a much higher number. Yeah. She can help with that. Okay, let's work on that and then uh if you're not watching us on YouTube, you're missing this beer. Uh anyway, I'm excited to have you here because I've always been really fascinated about GitLab's culture. They're

5:39 So many unique elements to how you guys operate and clearly it's worked out. Really well the company. I was just looking up the stock is a eleven billion dollar business at this point. It's been around for a long time. So I wanna dive into a number of the different ways that you guys work, especially the stuff that's really unique.

5:54 And the first element is your very unique culture of transparency. I have not seen anything like this elsewhere. So first of all as an example, you post Uh videos of your team meetings on YouTube. That's correct. Yeah.

6:07 Okay, and I wanna chat about what like the policy, but just as an example, I was watching a Product team meeting. of your product team a while ago, where they're talking about a book club of Marty Kiggins' recent book. I was watching engineers talking about some scaling. challenges they were having. There's a video of you being introduced to the UX team from a year or two ago, and maybe it was like after a reorg or something.

6:26 Uh what's just like the policy on which videos go online? 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.

6:48 Uh but to your question like 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.

7:06 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. You know, in a single day or even everything that's recorded during the day. Uh,'cause there can be multiple meetings happening at once that are also showing up there. But a good example of that is my biweekly product meeting.

7:25 Where we kinda go over things we're working on. Things we're excited about, troubles we're having, challenges and how we can We're better together. I can tell you that It was a change joining Git Web in twenty nineteen to have that much content just be available?

7:40 You also learn how to be better on meetings because of it. Uh, my first meeting was like my first day and I spent a lot of time looking all over the room'cause 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 You're not really engaging because you're

7:58 It's something it's like just an audio call. And so I think it's been really good for the company. Uh the Great example I can give you is like we get people who then contribute because of what they see. Mm. And so we've had You know, customers, open source community members go

8:13 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.

8:33 So just to understand there's Developers watching team meetings. Noticing there's like a bug or an issue or challenge and then Just going ahead and committing. Code to fix it.

8:43 Uh yeah, so sometimes it'll be open source. Yeah. Community contributors who are doing that. So Wow. Yeah, they'll hear about that. They'll look at the issue tracker'cause the issue tracker's all public. And those be like, Oh, I can I can do that. Let me just do that. And make the project better.

8:58 Oh my god. That's crazy. Okay. And so the policy as you described is uh it's up to the person. They decide. Is this something we can share that feel comfortable with? Yeah, it's up to the person and the Uh, the team so like I do have a couple of policies for the product division where we don't post the recording. We

9:16 used to do live our what we call our performance indicator reviews. And key reviews. We stopped putting those public'cause they 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

9:32 Is posted, but then like the nitty gritty. Like down details that would be considered material non public information or You know, customer data that would need to be kept safe. Those things we

9:45 We we'll record those but keep those internal and not make them Power. Okay. Amazing. So you have these videos. You also have this handbook, the Git Lab handbook. which is handbook.getlab.com, which is

9:56 Also shares tons of pieces of how you all operate. So just like skimming through it, there's like your mission, your vision, your strategy. how you onboard people, your anti harassment policy How count pale balls? Work lab like

10:09 Hilarious, amazing stuff. It's great too, right? Like I don't remember how many pages it is now. Uh but it it's huge. And so

10:19 Um, what I see what happens, and this kinda gets into the first example, any like 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 view view source. And I just heard from a company who's now becoming a customer who

10:36 We're like we want a Redu R U X. mission and how we operate in a UX department. So we cloned the UX handbook within handbook.getlab.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

10:52 Use it as a way to start. And I think for me across my career I've been in the situation where I needed to fix something or restart something or Yeah. I'm the first person in the department and

11:05 There's a lot of uplifting you have to do in that role. Whereas If you can leverage what Git Lab has done. That's amazing, right? It really helps you continue forward really quickly. Yeah, I think one of the most interesting for me has been the uh competencies for product managers. Something a lot of PM teams are looking for is like how do we

11:22 level and ladder and create levels for Teams and you guys share all that and you guys have a really good version of that publicly. So we talked about the YouTube I wanna have I have a bunch of questions about how this actually works, but So you have the YouTube channel of video of tea meetings, you have the handbook. Is there anything else that I'm not that

11:37 Mm. That I'm not mentioning that's public that other companies don't share? I 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.

11:52 to also create and comment on and so Whenever we do a call with a customer, I present at a conference. Or my team presents, we always say Hey, please go look at our issue tracker and If there's something you like?

12:05 voted 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 like paragraph, but sometimes if you go deeper

12:24 We have like a one year direction that is very detailed. It 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 it in the next six months, and here's how we're going to do it. And I think those are those all those things together. have really allowed Gilab to be the most transparent publicly traded company in the world and

12:45 We're very proud of that because It's just in our DNA to do it. I think what's really interesting about this is it's kind of the epitome of It's not the idea, it's the execution. You g share so many of

12:57 The things that most people keep secret. And It's worked. I guess is there any lessons there of just like it's actually a lot. The execution is what separates you from everyone else. Someone could just basically copy everything you're doing and

13:08 In theory build something like you've built, but But they haven't. Yeah, I I think you're touching on actually my I when I interviewed in twenty nineteen, I actually asked Sid, our co-founder and CEO, a a similar question. I said, Hey I and I came from security into GitLab. And I say, Like, hey, we don't share more than four or six weeks with a roadmap with

13:29 customers and even sales because we were in the situation where We didn't want our great idea to be taken. And Bill. before we built it. And that had happened to me at other places I've worked. And so What we

13:43 In that conversation with him, he basically said You know, it's Product's job to be ambitious and Z Engineering's job to meet that ambition. And if you Think of it that way.

13:53 And it's that collaboration between the two. It becomes less scary to put the information out. Uh but you are right, we're very Even transparent there. The thing that gets into what you mentioned, the ability to ship software.

14:06 I'm I'm floored by these numbers. These are real numbers for us. We we still ship twelve releases a year. Used be on the twenty second of every month. It's now the third Thursday. So we don't have to have people work over a weekend. But 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

14:27 Little over twelve years. Someone listening to this may be like, Okay, wow, we should try this sort of thing. Let's try to be transparent. With everything, meetings everywhere, public, uh Handbook. I imagine this doesn't work.

14:39 For most companies. So a question just on my mind is what do you think it takes for a company to work this way? Like what are some elements that need to be true? For them to succeed being this transparent. Yeah, I think it is pushing yourself to realize what is actually confidential and what actually is not confidential.

15:00 Uh other places I've worked, they 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 like 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.

15:23 I suppose 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

15:33 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, looking at

15:49 The the beer that I have, instead of just listening to the But Podcast. Uh I think they can hear the beard too. Oh I it it gives me presence. So yeah.

15:59 Makes your voice deeper. There you go. So um what ends up happening I think for us a coffee chad is like the equivalent of like walking in and running someone in a in a kitchen. So you're getting More coffee or tea or water, right?

16:12 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. And

16:24 It almost has to be uncomfortable and then you realize you're you're starting to really truly be transparent and you're allowing other everyone to contribute. I imagine this isn't all upside and rosy and rainbows all the time. Is there anything that you've heard of or ran into where this caused a problem? Either for the company or someone. Internally. Yeah, that's a great question. So I I think if you go back to the like you have to push yourself to your uncomfortable

16:46 Sometimes it ends up being Overly tran uh transparent. And The Git Lab has had its fair share of things at times where And issues public, they probably shouldn't have been public.

16:57 Like an or issue tracker or Yeah, the recording accidentally gets set to public when it should have been set to private. Uh and those are just Pain points and and learning and then As long as you're reinforcing that learning across the team.

17:11 You end up not making that same mistake again. And I I will say that I think the risk of that occasionally happening. is way below the value of actually pushing yourself to do it.

17:24 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 readouts that you can post on Slack that are just saying like hey, here's everything that happened this week with the team.

17:40 And then you'll so slowly 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 make your issue tracker public. If you're like Git Lab and you're using Git Lab.com.

17:56 Uh, maybe you can Share the Details we share about customer meetings and our conversations with them, obviously without saying their name, but You'll find the right balance for you and I think you'll truly find a

18:09 As a company become more productive. To convince someone that this is worth doing. What do you find her? The biggest benefits of operating this way,'cause it sounds like it sounds like more work and it sounds like there's more risk. And so what do you find are the benefits and it also just like maybe second order benefits that you didn't directly expect.

18:27 Yeah, so I I would say the big thing I've seen is uh focus on results, especially for our customers. We are a global company. We weren't always as big as we are, but You know, Git Lab is over two thousand people. It allows people to asynchronously consume what happened while they were offline. And it

18:45 Gives them both more engagement. As well as that lack of feeling of like FOMO or fear of missing out. And To me, those are really the top level items that come out of it. The secondary benefits of those are of course

19:00 Teams feel better aligned. Yeah. Find things that you may not find till the end of a software release or beginning of a go to market campaign you have to redo something. And so

19:11 I just think really And I say this with the 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 it, you might find out that 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.

19:31 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. 'Cause they're not being siloed out of the conversation. Well, there's it feels like there's two elements here. There's being transparent internally with here you can listen to every meeting that you've had.

19:49 As an employee. But where you guys go is one step further is anyone can pay attention to this and read your handbook. What do you find are the biggest benefits of that element of just like being public about the stuff? Yeah, I mean, for me it it really comes down to the engagement we can get externally because our is your tracker is public, our customers comment on it, we get community contributors commuting uh committing to our code base and Helping GitLab be a better product.

20:14 I can see where in certain industries we'll say like financial services maybe you can't do that. As much? 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 it in heavily regulated industries where they're starting to publish more of the roadmap externally.

20:31 is a way to build more trust with their users and their customers because now they know where 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 it's done today and You get a community feedback loop, which

20:48 Is great, especially when being in a product division. So one one takeaway here is it feels like most of the benefit is In Products that are building with a community component. And

21:01 developer oriented and open source. Feels like those are like the Venn diagrams of where this is most impactful versus like Slack doing this or I don't know. Salesforce.

21:11 Yeah. Yeah, I mean I would say that Uh if you're in tech and you're building a product, regardless if you're a developer platform or a dev tech ops platform like us. I think there is benefit. I think

21:23 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.

21:37 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

21:51 Column A or column B. I was browsing around through the handbook and I looked at your core values and there's some really sweet things in there. So within the collaboration core value, there's a value of kindness.

22:04 Which I love. What is that? look like in practice at GitLab. the values really come together in a way that I've not seen other

22:14 Company values come together and I don't know 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

22:31 We say assume positive intent. Assume the person is traditionally just asking for help or is trying to be helpful. Yeah, have short toes. Like Don't read something and think it's meant.

22:42 A different way. And that's where like the kindness comes in as well. Is that if you're s treating each other with kindness and assuming positive intent. you end with a lot less of the negative headbutting you can have, especially in an asynchronous culture like GitLab.

22:56 Yeah, they're our team, I will see my direct reports usually at least a couple of minutes a week on a Zoom call. But that's not the case for everyone at Git Lab? Right. And same thing with other teams and sometimes it's hard to Assume

23:10 What the person's intention actually is, and so we say Yeah, be con Assume the positive in ten. Realize that everyone's here to help each other out and I can tell you When people ask me like

23:22 What's it like working at Git Lab? I always kinda 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 employer. Uh, straight out of college. If we're doing that, then there's a lot less of that tension and headbutting that can happen in organizations, especially when

23:39 We don't see each other all the time in person. Some of the other elements along the P kindness is uh say thanks and say sorry. And negative feedback is one on one. Yeah, by the way, like for those who Are looking at the

23:53 The values can go to about dot getlab.com slash values. And you can see them. But what I will share with you is that Like We have a thanks channel.

24:02 Where people just post a thank you note whenever they are truly thankful for something and That channel is constantly getting those messages in and it's reinforcing that. engagement that you really want to have where people are working together. Collaboratively and assuming positive intent and so forth, but I will say the negative

24:19 is one on one that you mentioned, Money, 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 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 positive intent because

24:38 Negative feedback should be one on one. Yeah, I think the more you talk about this, we're gonna talk about remote work. It's all it all works together. Remote work. almost forces you to be very specific in how you communicate. be transparent about all the things going on at the company. So this all makes a lot of sense as kind of this Flywheel, I imagine, that kicks in.

24:54 I 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

25:09 The company continuing to grow and adapt them. as we've gone from again like one person to over two thousand. You mentioned uh the valley of short toes, which I was definitely gonna ask about. Talk about what that means. Yeah, so the short toes is, you know, it's really about the it's about the work. It's not about you. And so

25:28 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 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

25:45 People can consume them and 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 is the next time I do it.

25:54 It provides a lot more value. And I think that is really uh where that short toast comes in. It's about, you know, comment on the work. Not the person. It's not look what you did. It's like this could

26:06 Have been better this way. And If you're Assuming positive ten, having short toes. You end up having less

26:13 Uh headbutting. I think the implication here is that you don't want to feel like people are stepping in your toes, so your toes end up being short, right? That's like where this comes from, I imagine. It does. And part of that ties back to those other those other values, right? Like Like you aren't your work.

26:30 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.

26:40 Whereas if you had short toes, it's found contributing and and so forth. It's so funny. I love the Way of describing it and it's The exact opposite of Uber, whose one of their values I think was encouraging s toe stepping, step on toes.

26:53 Don't worry about it. Long toes. Our our approach was to to take the other side of the move fast and break things. Right. It's it's more about building that community, that trust, and everyone hitting the results together. Sounds like a delightful place to work.

27:09 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 to those values and it makes it A great place to work and It's been the happiest I've been

27:26 And I've been here four and a half years. Wow. I love hearing this. And it's done great also, which is, you know, it shows that you can run you can build a very successful business and people can be very happy. What a rarity. Yeah.

27:40 No, agreed. Are there other values that you find to be really core to the way Git Lap operates that I haven't mentioned? Yeah, I think for me it's the results and the efficiency ones that always hop out for me. Yeah, results is focused on results for customers. And that's why we do everything we do.

27:57 Any almost any company that's really the case. And so how do we help our customer get their software should faster, make their software more secure, give them better visibility into its usage. And having that focus on the customer is the number one thing. It allows us to be a lot more empathetic.

28:16 Mm. 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.

28:28 I is the leader of Product Will said 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 our chat. And so

28:46 I think for me those things kinda come together. It's okay to ship something that you think is good. But maybe it's not great yet. you know, get it out there, get that flywheel so you get the feedback from the customer and then iterate on it. And

28:59 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. Did you say a three year and seven year vision? Yeah, we have on the website up to I think a thirty 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 the levels at which we plan.

29:21 What's the thinking there? Uh the thing is to make sure we're always going towards where we think our customers are gonna need and so to give you Uh an example. The three year strategy says our goal is become the first all ops platform.

29:35 And that essentially say that we want to be the single source of truth for R and D organizations. And that's not just The people who are in R and D, like Product, UX. engineering infrastructure.

29:47 but for the teams that work around them, including legal sales, product marketing, compliance, and so forth. And so For us at all ops means it's everything that's needed to do that. And that's why we've built not just source code management, code review and so forth, or CI CD. We've added security and compliance, we've added enterprise agile planning. We're even trying to add Service desk, service management functionality.

30:11 And Git Lab as well. And so For us. That's our long term goal. And then we empower the teams Two

30:19 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 Sec and ops. Those have stages in them that map to the DevOps tool chain like create, plan, monitor, verify.

30:38 And then those have groups in them. And those groups are that lowest group I'm talking about where we s push down 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.

30:52 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 it allows us to tie stages together. To make sure we're hitting the outcomes that we need.

31:10 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 then there's company's long longer term vision and then mission. And I love that all of this is there in the handbook. Like you can see all this and then you can also see your cadence for Revisiting it, planning, team meetings. Executive staff.

31:28 Discussions. 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 that get lab dot 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.

31:45 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 trackers so you can easily find them. We have I think seventy two thousand open Issues right now in our backlog.

31:59 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. There it is. I'm looking at it.

32:14 I love it. When someone joins Git Lab And Things don't work out. They don't end up being a fit. Other than

32:23 I them not just like having the skills they need. What do you find is the most common reason for them not being a fit at Git Lab? So I I think it really kind of doved into the remote. Experience. Remote is not for everyone. And we'll have people who come and they're really great.

32:40 They don't even have to be an underperformer. But they're missing that in office every day feeling Uh maybe some in some cases they just wanna Get out more and be

32:52 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 the thing for them is that they just don't feel connected the way they want to be connected. And

33:07 I'll be honest, I started at Git Web. A couple months before the pandemic. And so For me I got to attend R sales kickoff, but that was only a third of the company And it's not until actually

33:19 in March this year that we're doing our first company wide get together. where I'm gonna 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.

33:33 Um, 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 uh human connection can be missed.

33:44 More so for some people than others. 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 I'm not enjoying the all remote.

33:58 Uh I'll call it lifestyle because it is an adjustment to how how your day goes and and how you engage and all that sort of thing. That makes sense. And that's a great segue to uh where I wanted to go, which is talking about remote work. I think you might be the largest all remote company. Do you think that's is that true?

34:14 We were pre the pandemic when we were around eleven hundred people. Uh I think a everyone Now having recalls back to the office, we might be back to being the largest all remote. I just I I've not seen a number yet that from other companies of how much are they still remote, but

34:32 I was during the pandemic, I think like a Google and Apple would win as the largest all remote. Right. Whereas Yeah, now those people are coming back to the office. We might be back to being the the largest. Okay. And I think even if you aren't currently the largest, it feels like you will be probably long term'cause people

34:47 Kind of go there and then move back. Also you Git Lab has been doing this way before school, way before everyone else started to try to Go down this direction. Feels like there's a lot that people can learn from how to work remotely successfully. I'm curious when you talk to other

35:00 leaders and other companies that are trying to improve the way they work route, what advice do you share? What tips do you have for Making remote work more effective. 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.

35:14 Uh LinkedIn where someone will say I read this in the Project Handbook, but I don't understand how this then applies in an all remote environment. And so I usually kind of say like If you're looking at being a remote for first culture, there's a couple of things you just need to

35:30 To understand and and focus on Things like Be transparent. We've talked about that a bunch already. Uh focus on results, not hours. Yeah, with

35:40 Sometimes people will get fixated on the well, did you work the full forty hours this week or Wow, you worked more than forty hours this week. Like what what's going on? And Instead it should be about, Hey, we've agreed to an outcome and have we achieved that outcome. I think overcommunication's also okay. That I share with

35:57 People like Oh yeah, the best way to put it is Yeah, my I have I have an executive coach. He's a great guy. One thing he said was that You know, if you think you're communicating a hundred percent accurately, that's probably sixty or seventy percent for the other person.

36:12 And shoot for like a hundred and fifty percent. And so that's something that I think really helps in that environment. And then lastly, and and we just talked about this is making time for in person. Events. Yeah, I have my leadership team get together every quarter.

36:28 Every other quarter of that we bring in our director plus group and we're actually doing that next month. Uh, last time we did it was in October. And see if you can find ways to get more part of the team together. I I just share. We're having our first company wide Get together since the pandemic.

36:44 Um, but that doesn't mean that we had to wait that long. I got the product division, all hundred and forty of us together. across two different cities over the course of a month to allow People to got finally get to meet each other and Make that human connection. I think When someone gets to do that.

37:01 It makes Zoom feel a little less scary'cause 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 good if you just never Saw your co workers in person. So the four

37:16 Pieces of advice you shared. Transparency. Spent a lot of time just being more transparent. Focus on outcomes versus quality, quantity of hours. Overcommunicate and make time for in person.

37:27 Within the outcomes bucket. A lot of people Like Yes, it sounds great. We will focus on outcomes. We're not gonna think about how many hours you're working. It's hard to do a lot of times'cause in this sort of work it's like I don't know, this

37:41 Like H what should I expect of this person to achieve? Maybe this bug takes a week, maybe took a day. Do you have any just advice to help figure out a nail like here's how we can create outcomes that connect well with people actually working. Fully.

37:55 Fixing a bug is kind of like a uh is more of a deliverable than like a business outcome. And so we're we try to make them things like We want to have sixty percent of our customer base using this Part of the portfolio.

38:12 Now what what do we do to get there? And that allows people to then have a measurable outcome. That does tie back to how many hours they're working to a degree, right? Cause you're scoping it. But it's not about the Ship twenty features next month.

38:26 That could take you More than a month it could take you Uh Day and a half if you break down your feature into tiny little features, right?

38:35 Whereas it's more like Celebrate the adoption, not the the shipping. And I think that's really where we've tried to move. Git Lab as a company's always been very Focus on how fast we ship software. But that's not really how our customers use it. It's more about

38:52 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 do with that?

39:08 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 bites, but be the Use case the pain point. 'Cause sometimes you actually don't need to ship a new feature per se. Sometimes you just have to make it more usable.

39:27 Right. And then all of a sudden you you're getting the outcome you're looking for. You said that a lot of people reach out to you and try to Dig into some of the things you Do What are some of those most common

39:36 questions people ask you and or where do people mo of most often go wrong when they're trying to Work the way all work. The probably the Top topics that people reach out to me for. The first is

39:47 How did you get into product? 'Cause like 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 I'm independently wealthy now.

40:00 And uh 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? The Next topic is the I see GitLab has this very transparent handbook and this Give up unfiltered channel.

40:16 Like what? Like wh 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 I talk about myself and my time in the office versus not in the office and

40:30 The things for me. I was very transparent with the team when I started twenty nineteen that I'm like This makes me a little freaked out. I'm not sure this is gonna be the thing for me. And I love it now. I can't imagine not doing it.

40:42 I like to look back at that time when Gillard made the offer to have me come in and start leading a part of the product division and my wife saying, You're gonna love this. I don't know why you're questioning it. So Listen to your friends, your family, your Your partner may they can also help you with that sort of decision.

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41:47 which has led to higher product usage, better retention, and more customer upsells. Visit useparagon.com slash Lenny to see how Paragon can help you go to market faster with integrations today. That's use. P A R A G O N dot com slash Lenny Let's do a quick tangent on that first

42:05 bullet you mentioned of getting into product. What advice do you share with people and they're just like, Should I get into product? How do I get into product? I I'm very transparent that product is not necessarily the uh Rock star role that people think it is? Yeah. The way I tell people who are new in their career, maybe they're now an associate or intermediate PM and get lab or

42:23 Other places I've worked that like If everyone's really annoyed at you, you're probably actually doing your job well. Right. Product is the like the hub in the middle of the wheel and those folks are engineering, marketing, sales, legal and so forth and Like they can't do your job unless you're properly leading and if

42:41 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.

42:50 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

43:00 The I call it like order taker or like deli counter worker. In the US where like everyone gets a number and you just feel what that is. Think about like what do all those requests together really mean? And then do that. And not

43:14 Take the orders. And so That's kinda the advice I give is like It's not the uh big sexy role that everyone talks about. It's actually A lot of work.

43:25 A lot of Discussion sometimes, tension. And You know. lead with the customer first and the use case and the pain point, and then everything else will kind of fall in behind that.

43:37 I completely agree. It's the most thankless, painful job there is, but also the best job. Yeah, I mean I w I now I've been doing it for a while, I can't imagine not being in product. You know, and so Uh, I'm glad I made the change and I've not looked back.

43:52 Specifically with PMs in a remote culture. I never worked in the remote world as a PM. Covet happened after I left the field and started doing this crazy weird job. Is there any Tips you could share with PMs that are just struggling in a remote world where it used to be. You just walk up to an engineer, hey, how's it going? How's this thing looking? Let's check out this design.

44:10 Give me advice for just how to do those sorts of micro interactions and Stay on top of things. Yeah, there's there's uh 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, this I have a daily stand up or a couple weeks stand up.

44:27 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 at Get Lab, we do what's called a deep dive interview where we Have the person try that out.

44:45 And they engage with another person or product who's playing the engineering side of that conversation. And then It really helps both us see whether or not the person has the potential. To be able to work in that type of environment. Oh, this is part of the interview process. In the interview process, correct. And then it also gives them the opportunity to decide

45:03 Can they actually do it? And we had Canada to go like, you know, this wasn't for me. Yeah. And so That that's the first thing is like writing real concise requirements is really key. Just understand.

45:16 Before we move on. So in the interview, so what is it that they do? You ask them here, write the requirements for this feature that we have and then They kind of do a role play with As part of the interview with an engineer asking them questions about it. So it it's actually they can write requirements for anything. We d we're not using it as a way to get like free

45:33 Requirements written up. part of the every process or like One Canada. Uh, their topic was they chose Bicycles.

45:42 And so it's like you're gonna 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 are releases, but like that first

45:54 Iteration, what is the MBC for that or minimum viable change towards a And that then they create that after having like an hour Zoom call with the person who's gonna do it with them talking through it some. They then go write those things and then they engage with that person. It's always someone in prior. We don't pull our engineering team in to do it.

46:14 But Yeah, they'll ask a follow up question on the issue and then Let them rewrite something in the issue or the last one question, maybe that causes them to to find something better and I personally when I was interviewing thought

46:28 Like this is a weird step. I'm coming in as a director at the company. And then I finished it and was like, This is the best experience I think I've had. Like this has to stay under interview process. Wow. And so That all ties together is that first First thing.

46:45 Don't wave. Like if you're concerned or wondering something is going off the rails or You just want to know some things. A on track. Like don't wait until your next check in point. Well that's

46:56 A lot of the teams here do a once a week stand up. Like Just Ask a question on that issue or on the merger class or Send a Slack message right away.

47:05 The last thing you want to do is have a twenty four hour, forty eight, seventy two hour cycle go by. And A developer or your engineering manager is stuck. Or You know, they've asked you a question and now you're leaving them kind of hanging.

47:18 And not getting the answer they need. And that's where, like, to your point, you used to block up to a cubicle taps on the show and be like, Hey, what's going on? And now it's Gotta do that digitally, and that is Reach out on the communication platform. We do Slack.

47:32 Like reach out on Slack or comment on the GitLab issue or merge request. For this to work, the values again come up where you assume good intent. You be kind, people 'Cause I think oftentimes the company's a PM checking in often feels like goddamn Leave me alone. I just want to work on this thing. You just don't trust that I know what I'm doing.

47:50 But I think with these values that helps avoid that, I imagine. It does. And I think it also Kind of feeds back into the those remote Work. Items as well.

48:01 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

48:17 This can be knocked down in a week. Right. Well Not just wait. Reach back out and say, like, hey, this is done. Like, what's the next thing? Awesome.

48:26 You mentioned Slack as a tool you use. What other tools do you find really interesting that people may not be thinking about for working successfully in a remote environment. I I'm gonna be biased here and say Git Lab as a product. You know, we Uh we call it dog fooding, but we use it for everything we do.

48:43 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

48:52 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 gonna become uh 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

49:14 Like Lenny You ask me a question, I answer it, and you go but I don't understand. Like you ask it a different way and then I answer it again. You're so 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 we use, Git Lab is very anti email. In a lot of ways, obviously we use it for external communication, but internally it's on an issue.

49:38 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.

49:52 So everyone can benefit from it. So when someone updates an issue, do they get binged in Slack when to go check it out? It's not like an email. Yeah, it it does. Um 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.

50:08 You can have it send you an email. I have it actually email me and it goes into a folder. Actually created uh we use Google Workspace and If it's a You've been mentioned. To do, it goes into one.

50:21 Like we're gets one. Get la our uh Gmail label if it's a Hey, this is 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.

50:33 Got it. You talked about this handbook workflow? So I was reading a bit about that. So basically the handbook is like, you know, it's like essentially treat us code. People submit PR requests to change the way handbook, which essentially is changing the way the company's operating. Can you just talk about that workflow? There's like a piece of like update the handbook before you make change.

50:53 Yeah, so we 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

51:11 open up a merge request and and make it right. And we sometimes make jokes in the product division'cause when product managers are onboarding the handbook feels like the product and In their three week of onboarding, they may end up opening a bunch of merge 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?

51:33 But then there's also the bigger things. So our product development lifecycle and that work 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 exactly how we're gonna operate for a milestone, that iteration again, where

51:53 Hey, what's expected three weeks before or two weeks before from you? And then that allows Some of those values we talked about earlier to come into effect because now You'd also have 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.

52:09 But then If there are bigger changes, we of course have processes for those that are defined. Great example is if you're going to introduce a new category, which is a new part of the product, it requires my sign off to do that. Right, if you're going to change that product development. Framework that

52:24 Helps you prioritize. That's that's gonna 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

52:39 A team perspective to a global wide that you can contribute to. 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 to the company. But whether you make that

52:58 One milestone is a hundred percent new features, next one's a hundred percent bug fixes. As 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.

53:10 And references back to the bigger Handbook. Got it. One more tactical question about remote work. What's your time zones policy? How do you align time zones and get people talking and not bothering each other when they're sleep?

53:23 It's a good question. So We focus on asynchronous communication first. And so that means that Like key decisions. That involve people who are in a time zone where the meeting's not occurring.

53:34 That waits until they're back online because they're the directly responsible individual or DRI as we say here. We also focus on making sure the meetings that do happen. Are optional. And are both recorded as we talked about at the beginning, but also have really good nodes. And so that way someone who's in a different time zone can

53:53 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 Git Lab Dedicated.

54:08 He lives in Germany. But he's a leader at Git Lab. 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, and so That means that he may not be online when some parts of his team are online, but if he's communicating asynchronously

54:26 And giving clear outcomes and empowering the people who make the decision. It's okay that they may not have overlap. Yeah, 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

54:41 a half hour overlap in our day. But She was always highly efficient as a leader. And her team was also geographically dispersed and they were highly effective and To kinda give you the way I've looked at it.

54:54 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

55:04 I Can't make it to a leader or meeting a Is more APAC time friendly. 'Cause maybe that's where a lot of the team members are. I have leaders on the west coast of the United States who will take that call.

55:15 And they're empowered to do that. And so That's how we kind of deal with it. We are in sixty countries or over sixty countries at this point. We've had to be very careful to be inclusive. And that's what drives those things. Well no

55:28 taking recorded meetings that asynchronous focus on communication. I was just thinking uh with all the recordings. You've done you could train an L M to basically run your business at this point. I imagine engineers are thinking about that. I don't think anyone's thinking of that yet, though maybe they are. They they have actually focused on how do you make a version of David who's in every meeting and they're playing with some of the AI generated stuff, training it on videos that I did. So We have a lot of fun at Get Love, but we also accomplish a lot too, is is the takeaway from that.

55:58 Before I move on to a different topic. In terms of transparency or remote work, is there anything else that you think would be worth sharing or giving people advice on? the the best M R of the conversation is make sure you're focused on Communication being clear. Setting.

56:14 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.

56:26 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

56:41 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 l don't live in the Bay Area anymore. And I think it's phenomenal. I can your family and friends that I grew up with and

57:00 I can still work that tech job and That's not just true for me, that's true for the Gentleman I mentioned who's in Yeah, in Germany. We had an employee who is in Israel on the leadership team. We've had

57:10 PMs, UX designers, technical writers. And That's not just true for a product, it's true for every Division I get lab. Okay. So I asked the previous guest who worked with you, Hila Chu.

57:23 Who uh was head of growth, I think, at Git Lab for a couple years. And ask her what to ask you. And and asked generally by GitLab. And she said that Git Lab is really good at this uh breadth over depth. strategy of building product and that's been the key to success so far.

57:38 Can you just talk about that and why that's been important? Yeah, so I did. I I love Hila, by the way. I worked with her for about It's a little over two years, I think, b the time she was here. Uh Still.

57:49 talk to her occasionally over like LinkedIn Messenger. Someone asked me if LinkedIn was dead, by the way, and I think it's how I stayed in touch with former Colleagues and I think they're on the way up swing their calendar right now. I I think they are. I think. That's a whole nother whole other podcast on why that is. But I'll leave it. So heel's right. So when she started in twenty nineteen, a couple months after me, we were very much focused on

58:12 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 to be touching the different parts of the DevSecOps life cycle or the S DLC, depending on how you look at it. Now last year we made the conscious decision to start to pivot to depth over breath.

58:32 And that's because we have a very broad platform today. We are touching everything from Business continuity planning and OKRs. Two Enterprise agile planning and team planning, decoding. Deploying, securing, monitoring.

58:46 The entire S DLC 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.

59:03 C I C D 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 lots all boats a fact.

59:15 And so we pivoted in those queries now be depth over breath. That's awesome. That's so interesting. Basically T.

59:23 Create a wedge. And Gain traction. sounds like initially. Those just do a lot of things. But not be the best.

59:30 And now that you're Doing great. and have all these products the strategy shifted to going deep. This is a question a lot of founders always face. Should we Yeah, why should we go deep?

59:40 I know you weren't there at the beginning, but just I guess do you have any thoughts or insights from When it makes sense to go. Wide. versus when it makes sense to focus, because usually the advice is just do one thing really great and that's the only way to win. And sounds like clearly this is And opposite approach here.

59:55 Yeah, and and for those who are not as familiar with Git Lab as I know you are, like we are the leader in our space. We are the DevSecOps platform. Not not just us calling that, but user reviews, uh analysts like Gardner and Forester are calling that out. And so What for us it was was that

1:00:13 I think when you're going Really wide. you're trying to find your niche and like what you're gonna be really good at and what you can differentiate on. And for us what that was is you know, where are the key areas that we can truly help someone accelerate delivering software? And over the course of those years, you're right.

1:00:29 We're showing a fast growth period when I started and I was part of that Breath first. When I started in twenty nineteen. We found those key areas that we know if they are truly deep.

1:00:41 they bridge to the other area that's deep. And maybe some of those areas don't have to be as deep as the things around them. And so Good example is, you know, we start adding model ops functionality to GitLab in twenty twenty. We focused heavily on adding depth to ML ops, which is just one of the three pillars of that.

1:00:59 And we know that datops will probably be needed at some point, but if we have a nice integration with data ops platforms you can actually do all your ML ops work in GitLab. And be successful at it. with a lightweight con connector or component that's there. And so

1:01:14 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 don't aren't. Aren't investing necessarily as much and be still good enough. And

1:01:25 kind of touch on what you were touching on earlier about the Getting to that good enough level. What's interesting is my last interview that I did was with the co founder of HubSpot. Darbash and they had the exact same strategy.

1:01:39 Breath over depth. Also, one of their core values is transparency. They share all of their financials with everyone, salespeople, everyone. They see everything. So it's so interesting that there's Companies are very different and have very different markets.

1:01:52 But there's two really similar elements here. And I've worked out for both. I guess does that bring up anything? I don't know how much you know about HubSpot. I mean I I I know the company and know some people who work me in the past that have gone there. I think what What you're touching on is that There's some like product frameworks that are universal.

1:02:10 You know, 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 Oh, you will use like

1:02:23 Yeah. Jeffrey Moore'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 He's a saying, right? And then you're able to get that differentiation that and that market presence and

1:02:38 Yeah, well we go back to breath over depth when we're looking at new investments. So it's not like it's left Git Lab. It's currently part of our AI strategy that we're finding the the spots for dev sec off AI makes a lot of sense. But we also know that If those five things I shared with you are

1:02:55 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. What's interesting with uh I'll share briefly, is there go they're internal metric was if we're the top three product in any of the categories, we're

1:03:15 Doing too much. We're doing we're trying we're investing too much in these products. We don't wanna be the top three in any of these yet. We just want to be fine. Because holistically it's gonna be great. But just I wanna move on from this topic, but just

1:03:27 It's interesting. The approach you shared. for Git Lab of why going wide made sense was Explore. opportunities and then go big when you find something that works.

1:03:36 Up spot strategy was Our customers need all like the problem they have includes needs all of these many things. And so to solve their actual problem and Turns out we need to build a lot of things. Uh The way it is.

1:03:47 I imagine that was a part of Get labs need to. Yeah, I'm sure as we grew, you know, I I joined twenty nineteen. Company started

1:03:56 Years before that and You know, I 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. Cool. Okay.

1:04:13 Just a couple more questions. I know you guys are doing some cool stuff with AI. Let's talk about that. What's going on with AI in GitLab? I 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 a true DevSecOps platform. A lot of our

1:04:31 Competitors that people talk about are like a developer platform or developer experience. Type tool and We know that Yeah. twenty five percent of the SDL C is actually a trading code, seventy five percent is not.

1:04:44 And we wanna help. all those people around the developer be successful and We kinda set ourselves like three core tenants or principals for AI a couple years ago. Uh the first one was

1:04:54 uh AI across the entire software development lifecycle. We wanna 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 gonna break. And so to make them more effective, you've got to help everyone.

1:05:12 The next was we wanted to be both 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, are we source available so you can see how we're using them. We tell you how they're trained.

1:05:28 And the privacy part is we don't use your intellectual power 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. And using that, I think Other companies have Have shown why that's important with

1:05:43 Weeks. of customer data. And we wanna avoid that. I think the thing that's interesting As a source available open core company. were actually trusted by more than fifty percent of the Fortune five hundred or fortune one hundred?

1:05:57 So If more than fifty percent of those top companies trust GitLab to secure their intellectual property, we had to do that with AI as well. And then the last one was uh AI efficiencies. We wanted to make it so There is a boost in efficiency. Uh Git Lab Ultimate are top tier.

1:06:15 has a seven X boost on productivity. As From our customers doing a data analysis of their improvements. We want to take that to ten X.

1:06:25 as part of it. And so we we think AI can give us that last little bit of a burst. Now I did mention a minute ago and maybe I'll I'll stop there to see if you have questions on those and then I just want to talk a little about where we're going with Alex. I think it's pretty exciting. I guess the only question is just for other companies, other product leaders thinking about

1:06:42 Integrating AI, working with AI, any Tips or lessons you can share that might be helpful on their journey. Uh I what I would say is like we spend and this is really the the third tenant is finding the right model for the right use case. And good, I I point that out and I your question reminded me of it. What

1:06:58 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 pr 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

1:07:20 Around sixteen models we use today to make Git Lab. have its AI suite, which is called Get Lab Duo. And we've done that to say like, hey, this one's really good at explaining and resolving vulnerabilities. We're gonna use that for that use case. This one's better at summarizing conversations in plan. Let's use that.

1:07:36 And of course, like code creation is also an area where If you're using the same model for uh inline code completion as you are for code generation, which is Sharing blocks of code. You're gonna have a much different user experience. The things that generate blocks of code like functions.

1:07:53 Those actually take a while to run. They take seconds, sometimes twenty, thirty seconds to fully respond. If you're just wanna asking for the next couple of lines to be completed, you're not gonna wait that long. And so You've got to have somebody that can handle that as well. And so We've done that and I encourage everyone else to do that.

1:08:09 If you go to the Git Lab 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 sort of see why we chose them. And it actually has allowed us to get closer and closer to that that ten X that we're we're wanting to get our customers to.

1:08:27 I'm pulling up that page, but when you talk about models are you talking about like OpenAI's APIs for one and then Gemini for another, or is it like internal models you're building? Uh it's both uh GitLab created, open source, and commercial. Uh to do We've partnered with both Google

1:08:43 And anthropic and those are where the commercial models come from. Got it, got it. Yeah, and then we actually acquired a company at the beginning of twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two. Uh named Unreview. And

1:08:55 We have those models. Those are the ones that would be GitLab proprietary and then Uh, 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

1:09:11 I've studied things like ethical AI and AI at scale and that's allowing us to select the right The right model. Cool. I imagine part of this is because GitHub, your competitors owned by Microsoft and Open AI, and you try to avoid that whole area, as I'm guessing is a part of this thought process.

1:09:29 Well, it it's also about meeting those tenants, right? And so you know, we our partners at their commercial, they need to meet that same requirement, that same vision and Yeah, 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

1:09:48 Not every company uh 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 gotten to that point yet. Right, but

1:10:01 That's part of being a partner is you have to meet those same Values for lack of a better point that we have base of our customer base. So she being Trusted by more than fifty percent of the Fortune One hundred.

1:10:13 Makes sense. Okay, going in a totally different direction. Hila also said. The You're a leader with it.

1:10:20 Great sense of humor, and you often use your humor. to navigate very high stakes conversations and executive negotiations. And I think a lot of people would love to have the skill. Do you have any advice or lessons? Uh other than just being David.

1:10:34 And being who you are, I guess any lessons for leveraging the skill, building the skill. How you apply it. I I'll take the compliment from Hilo. Uh what I learned early in my career is that Tension, especially very

1:10:47 Like high, very tension. Driven conversations. Can really kill productivity, kill morale. And then I found that if I can deflate that a little bit. And kind of re add

1:10:59 S I don't say humanity to the conversation, but really disarm the topic. That people were able to move forward. And I think that's what she's talking about. I I will say that it probably is partially David being David to a degree.

1:11:12 Maybe I'm leveraging the class clown experience of my elementary and high school experience and Partising it for good now. Uh but I think people can also do that and Leaders who Have seen me do that.

1:11:26 Like Heela have learned that there's ways to do that if you can read the the read the room and the nuance and know whether or not it's okay to try to add a little bit of levy to it. But I guess they're a value part of my tool. Toolbell now? Like a tool on my toolbell and I'm glad she appreciates it.

1:11:41 Yeah, Not every joke lands, which I'm sure you're surprised you're not surprised by that, right? So Um but yeah. I think it's I think it's been Good to help.

1:11:51 Keep people moving forward. Love it. David, is there anything else you wanted to share or touch on or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? The big thing I just like to let people know, if you're not familiar with Git Lab or you haven't heard of Git Lab in a couple of years, like please go check out our website. We do

1:12:08 Everything across the software development lifecycle. You know, when I started in twenty nineteen, I was hired to add compliance and and security to DevOps, which has made us a dev tech ops platform. And now we've g gone from not just source code management and code review or C I C D, but True security and governance.

1:12:26 That includes things like our remote development offering where now you can even get developers up and running in minutes. on a software project. our enterprise agile planning capabilities and of course GitLab Duo. You know, we've heard from customers they've seen efficiency boosts of fifty percent and above. By leveraging Git Lab Duo and

1:12:45 I would say if you've not heard from us in a while or aren't as familiar, like please just check that out'cause We are truly unique in the space and It's something I take a lot of pride in. Yeah, people said no one's gonna want a platform. They want a bunch of point Like

1:12:58 Point solutions and customers end up with seventy five tools to try 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 at the beginning. I'm at the website and even then I'm like I still don't I think it could do a better job telling me everything that you do.

1:13:17 So just to quickly summarize so people know, do what are the bullet points of all the Products and solutions you guys offer real quick. We do everything across the software development life cycle. Some areas are really strong. Those key areas are

1:13:30 S CM code review. the what would be called the create stage and that In the tool chain. C I C D, we're industry leading there as well. Uh security and compliance. So we can do application security scanning. We can do

1:13:43 Uh things like software bill materials and Traceability and all the things that go around uh compliance and governance. And then of course we also have monitoring, whether that is Like value stream management and analytics. We can now do

1:13:58 product analytics. So you can have Git Lab 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.

1:14:16 Uh again. been awarded a leading s enterprise agile 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 The life cycle. But I I'll take your feedback lady back to marketing and say

1:14:30 I was just on an amazing podcast, met an Great guy. Hope we 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 That's right. Just make it a little bit clearer. Yeah.

1:14:43 Make the website clearer. Software faster. That doesn't tell me what I need to know. I like this list you gave me. Okay, amazing. We're solving all the GitLab's problems right here. There we go. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning ground. Are you ready?

1:14:58 I am ready. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Uh 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 as examples, but the core of it is still very, very amazing.

1:15:15 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. Uh there's the critical core context framework. And if you've read both of those books, it really helps you frame in

1:15:32 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 with uh the little battle risk. So Those things together. I think are really powerful. Does he talk about that in Zone to Win? Or is that just something independent of his books?

1:15:48 I think it was a class he created and it turned into uh a Chapter two in one of his books. I don't remember which book it's in though. Super cool. That'll work. Next question. Favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

1:16:01 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 uh I don't know, we'll call it like a Mystery criminal Type show. It's really, really good. Movie wise.

1:16:17 It's an older movie, but we're gonna just watch The Glass Onion. Really liked it. Uh and then There might be a little bit of a a Swifty and me and we watch the Aeros Tour. When a game available to watch and Uh also was phenomenal. I

1:16:31 Can't believe three and a half hours went by as quickly as it did. I also watched it and enjoyed it. Do you have a favorite interview question you like to ask candidates that you're hiring? Yeah, so I won't say there's a specific question. It's so much uh a method. So I really like the star method for asking questions. If people aren't familiar with it, Google it.

1:16:50 It's really powerful. And then how I then apply it to be my favorite question, depending if it's PM or it's uh someone in engineering or a department is Give them a scenario where there's a little bit of conflict. retention 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.

1:17:09 Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Yeah, so this is gonna be a sad moment for me. My favorite new product is actually going away. Uh Artifact News. I love artifacts. Yeah. I think it's actually hit the point where it's hit its end of life, but It was revolutionary for news.

1:17:26 I thought it was fantastic. Uh the things I use that are not the app that just yeah went away that So a little bit bad about uh I've really gotten uh a love for superhuman for email. It's really ha allowed me to make

1:17:41 where a Google Workspace customer, like more powerful. And uh most recently I just started using the Arc browser from the browser company and I think it's fantastic. I like how it organizes everything and archives tabs if they've been inactive for too long and all these things that I think just Took me from a single

1:18:00 Chrome window to like five Chrome window each with a hundred tabs and has made me more effective. Awesome. Also a huge fan of Arc. They've been uh the Josh Miller was on the podcast talking about how they operate And Superhuman's a sponsor of the podcast. So I love all your choices.

1:18:15 Do you have a favorite life motto that you like to come back to or share with people they find useful in work or in life? I actually have like Two or three. I'll say them quickly for everyone, but the first is like as a leader, my first one is Your team's accomplishments are theirs.

1:18:28 But their failures and misses are yours. And I early on in my career Would have loved it. To feel like sometimes like my work wasn't just then

1:18:38 Praises for my manager and as now a leader of a very large team at Git Lab, 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 like just Make it work. And

1:18:52 People Who are listening to your podcast might realize that's a Tim Gunsang from Project Runway. And it was kinda like my way of taking on the work the problem statement and making it a little bit more Like okay. This is the this is the thing you have to figure out, like make it work. Like what does that what does that mean?

1:19:08 For you. And so also lets me throw in pop culture too. And the last one and I'll say I I came up with this when I was back as an engineering director. Uh was, you know, it's just software, so anything's possible. Yeah, a lot of times someone will say, Well, I can't really do that.

1:19:24 It's like Well, but it it it is just software. Right. Like It's just it hasn't been done yet, but it's it's doable. David, this is so fascinating. The culture at Git Lab is fascinating. You're fascinating.

1:19:37 Thank you for making time and sharing all these stories and insights. Two five questions, where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you? If you want to follow on with GitLab, we're at GitLab on basically every social So go to any social media you can find us. For me personally.

1:19:52 I'm Dee DeSanto on LinkedIn. You just search for David DeSanto, I should come up. Uh 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 there, I'm just Dee DeSanto on I'm Blue sky. And then how listeners can really help.

1:20:11 There's Really two things. Like one Please share feedback with GitLab with my team. You can go and comment on our issues, our epics, our tasks. It's all public. So Plope things up, give us feedback.

1:20:23 That's always very helpful. Just go to get lab dot 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 uh their sales as well. So you're not just helping GitLab, you're helping everyone. As well as maybe contribute to the code. It can be as simple as fixing a small bug to

1:20:45 adding a new feature. Some of our favorite features are ones that others have contributed outside of GLA. Awesome. Well, David, again, thank you so much for coming and sharing. Now I'm gonna go watch this meeting you're in. Later on YouTube. Anyway, thanks for coming. Uh.

1:21:00 And Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me Lenin. Love the conversation. Let me know whenever. I'll come back. Amazing.

1:21:07 Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show. At Lenny's podcast dot com.

1:21:30 See you in the next episode.

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