GitLab Assembly takes place after reporting our earnings. It’s a review of the past quarter and celebration of our success, milestones, and results.
Quarterly: Three standalone GitLab Assemblies per year, one GitLab Assembly-type content incorporated into GitLab Contribute. For example, in FY22, the GitLab Assembly schedule was:
Assembly is a quarterly, company-wide 40 minute meeting consisting of ~25 mins content and ~15 mins Q&A. It is scheduled at two separate times so team members in all time zones have the opportunity to attend.
The call concludes with an AMA with all of E-Group. Team members can ask questions of any particular executive. The AMA doc will be circulated early so that team members can submit questions.
Team members should join muted, but they can unmute themselves as required to effectively participate in the conversation.
GitLab Assembly content creation is led by the People Comms & Engagement team and E-Group.
This is a People Comms & Engagement initiative and @kaylagolden is the DRI. The meeting is scheduled by the EBA to the CEO. The call is recorded and posted to Google Drive. The recording is internal only because we share sensitive information confidential to the company at the meeting.
Starting in FY23-Q4, the following timeline will be used to prepare key deliverables that will be needed to hold the event in close proximity to our earnings call. For a more detailed list of items needed for delivery, please visit the People Communications & Engagement handbook page.
Attendance:
The FY22 GitLab Assembly (previously called Fiscal Year Kickoff) took place 2021-02-18 at 8:00am and 5:00pm Pacific Time. It was attended live by approximately 800 team members, with remaining team members encouraged to watch the recording asynchronously.
The event was internal because it featured financial metrics and other information which was not public. It was recorded, and the recording is available in Drive.
This event was approximately 40 minutes long and was hosted on Hopin. The agenda was as follows:
Based on feedback from the FY21 kickoff and in the spirit of iteration, there were some changes to the format. Changes included:
Read the feedback from GitLab Assembly FY22 Kickoff
The FY21 Kickoff call was the first of its sort. The recording is on GitLab Unfiltered (GitLab Internal). The recording is internal because we talk about financial metrics which are not public. The slides can be found in the Drive under the title "2020-02-06 FY21 Kickoff".
We collected feedback in cos-team#15.
The structure was roughly as follows:
Feedback on the event was overall positive, with over 600 team members attending.
There were a number of problems that presented themselves. Below is a list of the problems and some proposed solutions to be solved for the FY22 Kickoff
| Problem | Possible Solution |
|---|---|
| People were locked out of the doc. | * We have 1-5 people designated as "typers" and everyone else gets view-only access of the doc. Questions are submitted via the Zoom chat. * Could use a slack channel and threaded responses. * GitLab Issues |
| People were locked out of the slides. | Share a PDF of the slides in #companyannouncements before the call, so that people who are locked out can still follow along. |
| Because this was a last minute idea that we executed on, we were only able to coordinate for one time. | We should have this at least twice, once in EMEA friendly time zones and one in APAC friendly time zones. Earlier scheduling will make this possible. |
| There were a lot of acronyms and concepts where it would be helpful to have a primer ahead of time so I could track better — things like ARR or CSM come to mind. | Make sure all acronyms are defined upfront. |
| The slide presenter dance | The "next slide please" dance? Something else? |
| Kickoff felt a bit like an extended GC and not visionary enough | Tailor content more appropriately to inspirational/visionary, especially at the beginning |
