CEO: Grow Incremental ACV according to plan. Sales prospects. Marketing achieves the SCLAU plan. Measure pipe-to-spend for all marketing activities.
VPE
Support: Improve Support expectations and documentation for Proof of Concept and Trial prospects, including temporary expanded Support focus for top 10 prospects (defined by Sales). 75% completed with segments redefined and workflows updated.
Amer East: 95% SLA for Premium/Ultimate/Gitlab.com customers and 95% CSAT for all customers
Amer West: 95% SLA for Premium/Ultimate/Gitlab.com customers and 95% CSAT for all customers
APAC: 95% SLA for Premium/Ultimate/Gitlab.com customers and 95% CSAT for all customers
EMEA: 95% SLA for Premium/Ultimate/Gitlab.com customers and 95% CSAT for all customers
Global team achieved 89% (93% achievement to the 95% goal), +5% increase over CYQ3 and trending up
CMO: Marketing achieves the SCLAU plan. 8 SCLAU per SDR per month, content 2x QoQ, website information architecture helps 50% QoQ.
Product Marketing: Complete Information Architecture for customer facing web site pages and add 50 product comparison pages.
Product Marketing: Deliver 15 enablement sessions each to sales and xDR teams - 30 total sessions.
Product Marketing: Target 6 industry analyst reports to include GitLab coverage.
MOps: Implement top three personas into our behavioural and demographic scoring model to get more qualified leads to SDRs.
Online Growth: Use data-driven approach and SEO/PPC/ABM/Paid social channels to drive traffic to high intent assets and increase signups for gated assets trials, webinars, and demos by 25% compared to last quarter.n
MPM: Support all field events with pre-event targeting, confirmations, sales notifications, and reminders to drive a minimum of 90% utilization per event.
MPM: Triple our marketable (aka opted-in for communications) database in Salesforce and Marketo by improving opt-in practices, revamping email communication positioning, and implementing strategic opt-in campaign to engage the database.
MPM: Launch an on-demand product demo and a weekly LIVE product Q&A session, generating 5x higher net new leads than previous weekly Enterprise Demo.
Content Marketing: Increase sessions on content marketing blog posts 5% MoM.
October: 55,583 sessions
November: 58,362 sessions
December: 61,280 sessions
CMO: Measure pipe-to-spend for all marketing activities. Content team based on it, link meaningful conversations to pipe, double down on what works.
Online Growth: Improve measurement of pipe-to-spend with more granular data. Work to expand reporting beyond initial pipe-to-spend calculation and ensure online actions are measured and reported.
Online Growth: Ensure site is properly tagged for attribution and optimized for crawlers and content and assets are aligned to Information Architecture.
MOps: Restructure Marketo/Bizible/SFDC to align the campaign & progression statuses across the system to allow for better multi-touch attribution tracking.
MOps: Streamline record management processes. Refresh SFDC layouts with unnecessary fields removed, create record views
VP Alliances: Establish differentiated relationships with Major Clouds. GitLab as a Service LoI on a major cloud, 500+ leads through joint marketing, GTM and Partner agreement in place tihe a large private cloud provider.
VP Alliances: establish GitLab as DevOps tool for CNCF. Three keynote/speaking engagements at CNCF events and 1000+ leads from Kubernetes partners
CFO: Use data to drive business decisions
Director of Business Operations: Create scope for User Journey that is documented and mapped to key data sources. 50%
Director of Business Operations: Top of funnel process and metrics defined and aligned with bottom of funnel. 70%
Data & Analytics: Able to define and calculate Customer Count, MRR and ARR by Customer, Churn by Cohort, Reason for Churn 75% - Some metrics still require review
Director of Business Operations: Looker Explores generated for Customer Support, PeopleOps, GitLab.com Event Data, Marketing Data 100%
Data & Analytics: Single Data Lake for all raw and transformed company data - migration to Snowflake complete with DevOps workflow in place, GitLab.com production data extracted and modelled 75%
Data & Analytics: Configuration and Business processes documented with integrity tests that sync back with upstream source (SFDC), dbt docs deployed 100%
Product: Listen to and prioritize top feature requests from customers through sales / customer success. 10 features prioritized. => 130% Complete13 items prioritized
CEO: Popular next generation product. Finish 2018 vision of entire DevOps lifecycle. GitLab.com is ready for mission critical applications. All installations have a graph of DevOps score vs. releases per year.
VPE: Make GitLab.com ready for mission critical customer workloads => 70%, meeting our business goals but by no means perfect, lots of automation to do.
Frontend:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15
Convert a Vue app to use GraphQL as a side-by-side feature with user opt-in (100% - Related issues was delivered behind feature flag)
Create, Plan:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15
3 charts in gitlab-ui (50% - Base Chart Component and Area Chart are in)
Distribution, Monitor and Packaging:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15
Rewrite and integrate 4 CSS components that align with our design system into GitLab (25% - Markdown type styling)
Dev Backend:
Adopt in collaboration with Product a consistent process for prioritizing
work across all backend teams (9/13) => 70%. Need product improvements to
help close gap.
Perform 3 iterations on retrospective process to be more effective for Engineering (3/3) => 80%
Gitaly:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15 => 100%
Deliver first iteration of Object Deduplication work => 100%
Gitter:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15 => 100%
Complete all issues in Phase 1 of the DR/HA plan working with the Production Team : We supported the Production Team with all questions and issues raised. Work to enable Geo for DR on GitLab.com continues. (100%)
Distribution:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15 => 100%
Automate library upgrades across distributed projects => 75%, completed work related to the omnibus-gitlab package but Helm Charts process still needs work.
Ops Backend:
Drive the implementation of a throughput dashboard for each development team and conduct a training for each: 13/13 dashboards, 1/1 practice training, 3/3 group training (100%)
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15
Configure:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 15/15 #566 (100%)
Merge smaller changes more frequently: > 10 average MRs merged per week: 8.7 average (87%)
Secure:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 0/15
Merge smaller changes more frequently: > 4 average MRs merged per week: 7 average (90 MRs over 12 weeks)(100%)
Continuous Deployment: Help with building CD features needed to continuously deploy GitLab.com by closing 5 issues related to Object Storage that are either ~"technical debt" or ~"type::bug": 2 out of 5 (40%)
CI/CD:
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 30/15 #5375, #564 (0% - Spent double our goal)
Merge smaller changes more frequently: >10 average MRs merged per week. (100% - Actual weekly average was 19 MRs)
Infrastructure: Make GitLab.com ready for mission critical workloads
Spend no more than 15 point of our error budget: 6/15
Deliver streamlined and cleaned-up Infrastructure Handbook => 80%
Complete phase 1 & 2 of Addressing database discrepancy for our on-prem customers => 70%, All schema discrepancy identified and documented. We still need to get more data on customer instances but have addressed all issues around missing index or extra index.
Support
Amer East: Develop at least 2 Premium service process improvements focused on improved coordination with TAMS, Premium customer ticket reduction efforts, and create premium ticket reports that give us more clarity of needs within our Premium customer base.
Amer West: Create a Support Engineer - GitLab.com Bootcamp more tightly aligned with Production Engineering. Initial version completed in coordination with the production team: MR1, MR2
APAC: TBD process improvement (e.g. SLA performance, Customer Experience, or Employee Development)
EMEA: Enable support team to create 30 updates to docs to help capture knowledge and improve customer self service. Track contributions and views to measure 'self service score' (support edited doc visitors / customers opening tickets). Research completed. Tracking not yet implemented
Establish a GitLab beta group and create a standardized process for running beta studies with users. Conduct 1 beta study with users to test and iterate on the process. Total: 90%.
Security:
Deprecate support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on GitLab.com: 100% Blog post
Complete and document 12 month roadmap for ZTN rollout: 100% Kanban board
Security Operations:
Document at least 5 runbooks for logging sources: 5/5, 100% Internal repository
Security and Priority labels on 50 backlogged security issues: 50/50, 100% List of issues
Application Security:
Complete at least 2 cycles of security release process: 2/2, 100% Releases
Conduct at least 3 application security reviews: 3/3, 100% Kanban board
Public HackerOne bounty program by December 15: 100% Blog post
Compliance:
Document current procedures for each of the 14 ISO Operations Security Domain: 100% Kanban board
Move vision forward every release. Prioritize at least one vision issue for each stage in every release. => 61% Complete. Of nine stages - 4 complete, 3 partials and two zeros.
Corporate marketing: Help our customers evangelize GitLab. 3 customer or user talk submissions accepted for DevOps related events.
Corporate marketing: Drive brand consistency across all events. Company-level messaging and positioning incorporated into pre-event training, company-level messaging and positioning reflected in all event collateral and signage.
Corporate marketing: Increase share of voice. 20% lift in web and twitter traffic during event activity.
CEO: Great team. ELO score per interviewer, executive dashboards for all key results, train director group.
CMO: Hire missing directors. Operations, Corporate, maybe Field.
VPE: Craft an impactful iteration to improve our career development framework and train the team => 70%, shipped a new BE eng benchmark and experience factor worksheets (also for SREs) to hopefully address career development and comp for a meaningful proportion of the engineering function.
VPE: Source 20 candidates by Oct 31 and hire 2 Engineering Directors: 100% (20/20) sourced, hired 1/2 directors => 60%, completed sourcing and hired a Sr Dir.
Frontend:
Scale process to handle incoming amount ofapplications and hire 2 engineering
managers and 10 engineers: 1 engineering manager and 10 engineers hired (92%)
Dev Backend:
Gitaly:
Source 10 candidates by October 15 and hire 1 developer: 10 sourced (100%),
2 hired (200%) => Hired one extra developer to compensate for
Alejandro's departure
Gitter:
Create hiring process for fullstack developer => 100%
Created hiring process and we are looking at candidates now, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/people-ops/hiring-processes/merge_requests/96
Plan:
Source 25 candidates (at least 5 by direct manager contact) by
October 15 and hire 2 developers: 25 sourced (100%), 2 hired (100%)
Create:
Source 25 candidates (at least 5 by direct manager contact) by
October 15 and hire 2 developers: 25 sourced (100%), 2 hired (100%)
Get 10 MRs merged into Go projects by team members without pre-existing
Go experience: 6 merged, 1 in review (65%)
Manage:
Source 25 candidates (at least 5 by direct manager contact) by
October 15 and hire 2 developers: 25 sourced (100%), 1 hired (50%)
Team to deliver 10 topic-specific knowledge sharing sessions
(“201s”) by the end of Q4 (4 completed)
Geo:
At least one Geo team member to advance to Maintainer (0%) : Two engineers are in the group being trained to be maintainers.
Distribution:
Source 25 candidates (at least 5 by direct manager contact) by
October 15 and hire 2 developers: 25 sourced (100%), 1 hired (50%)
Infrastructure: Source 10 candidates by Oct 15 and hire 1 SRE (APAC) manager: X sourced (X%) X hired (X%)
SAE: Source 10 candidates by Oct 15 and hire 1 DBRE: 5 sourced (50%) 2 hired (200%)
SRE: Source 25 candidates by Oct 15 and hire 2 SREs: 0 sourced (0%) 2 hired (100%)
Ops Backend:
Hire 2 engineering managers (1 manager for Release, 1 manager for Secure): Hired 1 (50%)
Configure: Complete 10 introductory calls with prospective candidates by Nov 15 and hire 3 developers: 6 prospects (60%), hired 3 (150%)
Monitor: Source 30 candidates (at least 5 by direct manager contact) by November 15 and hire 3 developers: >30 sourced (100%), hired 2 (67%)
Secure: Source 75 candidates and hire 5 developers: 215 sourced (100%), 3 hired (60%)
CI/CD: Complete 10 introductory calls with prospective candidates by Nov 15 and hire 2 developers: 5 prospects (50%), hired 1 (50%)
Quality:
Source 100 candidates (at least 5 by direct manager contact) by
October 15 and hire 2 test automation engineers: 52 sourced (52%), 2 hired (100%)
Security:
Source 100 candidates (at least 5 by direct manager contact) by
October 15 and hire 3 security engineers: 100 sourced (100%), 6 hired (100%)
Support: Source 30 candidates by October 15 and hire 1 APAC Manager 100% - hired new manager in November
Amer East: Source 30 candidates by October 15 and hire 1 Support Agent
Amer West: Source 30 candidates by October 15 and hire 1 Support Engineer: hired 1 Support Engineer (100%)
APAC: Source 30 candidates by October 15 and hire 1 Support Engineer
UX:
Source 50 candidates by October 15 (at least 10 by direct manager contact) and hire 2 UX Designers and 1 UX Manager: 70 sourced (100%), 2 hired (66.6%)
VP Alliances: Scale team to interact with our key partners. Hire Content Manager and Alliance Manager
CFO: Improve processes and compliance
Legal: Implement a new contracting process to roll out with the vendor management process.
Legal: Update global stock option program to ensure global compliance.
CFO: Create plan for preparing the Company for IPO
CFO: Improve financial performance
FinOps: Annual planning process complete with company wide benchmarks and 100% of functions modeled to enable scenario analysis.
FinOps: Headcount planning linked to requisition process that provides for recruiting and hiring manager visibility against plan assumptions.
CCO: Improve Recruiting and People Ops Metrics, including relevant benchmarketing data
Recruiting: Hiring and Diversity stats and goals defined by functional group
Recruiting: Rent Index Evaluation by functional group
Recruting: Single Source of truth for Recruiting data, ownership and progress. If we can get this down to 2 sources in Q4, that will be a win.
PeopleOps: Added clarity to the turnover data and industry benchmarketing. Attempt to get benchmark data for remote companies.
CCO: Continue on the next iteration of Compensation
PeopleOps: Review and revise benchmarks to meet our current Compensation Philosophy
PeopleOps: Explore and decide on revising the compensation philosophy that supports hiring and retaining top talent, and have the plan in place to move forward.
PeopleOps: Review and revise Rent Indexes to align with the compensation philosophy.
CCO: Continue to improve Career Development and Feedback
Redesign the experience factor model to focus on supporting development and conduct trainings.
Define Cross-Functional and Functional Group specifc VP and Director Criteria
Launch an employee engagement survey that results in at least 85% participation and 3 themes to work on as a leadership team.
CCO: Improve Recruiting efficiency and effectiveness to build a solid foundation to scale:
Clearly define and standardize process, roles, responsibilities, and SLA’s
Improve continuity and accountability through recruiter/sourcer/coordinator alignment
Launch candidate survey in Greenhouse
Implement and integrate new background check provider
Enhance candidate communication and templates (invites, updates, decline notices)
Optimize Greenhouse and provide refresher training to hiring managers
Support Headcount planning process driven by Finance to ensure one source of truth and process for hiring plan and recruiter capacity
Continue work on ELO score for interviews. First interation complete by mid November.
Product: Hire 2 Directors of Product => 100% Complete - hired Kenny and Eric
Engineering (VPE)
GOOD
Shipped several new impactful salary benchmarks
Shipped meaningful career development asset for BE engineers in the form of experience factor worksheets
GitLab.com is now meeting business goals
Error budgets allowed us to manage risk and solve some problems
BAD
Did not hire the second director of engineering we planned to
Did not address comp for every engineering role
Did not address career development for every engineering role
TRY
Delegate OKR process for managers to my directors in Q1
End error budget experiment in OKRs
Only do 2019 Q1 hiring KRs for teams that are not regularly hiring to plan
Delegate Director of Engineering hires to Sr Director of Development in Q1
Address comp expectations and career development for the remaining roles in engineering in Q1
Assume .com continues to meet business goals and not take on the mission critical goal in favor of more granular infra KRs in Q1
Arrange training in Q1 for career development facets (like writing secure code) for engineers
Frontend
GOOD
Met our engineering hiring goal and very close to closing also second manager. Ramped up the team for Hiring fast and the whole pipeline is now a team effort
Able to scale gitlab-ui, have the full workflow and the SSOT with design.gitlab.com while most of the work on documentation is automated
Onboarding new members with the frontend buddy system and constant prioritization of new hires worked well
We had a good analytical process of selecting a future proof charting library and drove it to integration a release cycle later
BAD
Scaling our CSS efforts is not effective enough and especially doesn't scale
Work on performance and technical base work slowed down
Our assets grow sometimes suddenly due to changes and without looking constantly at Webpack reports no one is aware of it
TRY
Replan, Restructure and Rethink our CSS refactoring
Focus on performance improvements and distribute that wider in the team
Even as our tooling improved, there is way more that we can do to improve workflows, automation, setup time and consistency by tailoring solutions 100% to our needs
Bring more tooling for JS development to GitLab itself so we have it integrated in our workflow but also others can profit (Webpack reports, etc.)
Dev Backend
GOOD
Changes to retrospectives seem well-received: feedback is that they feel
more productive and flow more cleanly
Clarified some terminology confusion with Product around prioritization
BAD
Cross-functional collaboration was hard to push due to absences.
Hard to have teams prioritize as we'd like due to gaps in the product.
Had a 'regression' in retrospective due to changing several things at once
TRY
Pushing more aggressively to prioritize what we need in the product
Keep in mind cross-functional collaboration may be difficult in Q4 due to
holidays
Keep policy iterations (e.g. changes to retrospective format) atomic to
better track success and avoid regressions
Plan
GOOD
Met the hiring target
No production incidents
One more person trained to lead technical interviews, another close
to finishing their training
Single prioritised list works well for the team
BAD
Despite a significant amount of effort towards the Elasticsearch
goal, we have not made any significant reductions in index disk
usage
Elasticsearch issues have a tendency to get lost or deprioritised
One person left the team
Although we aren't the most-impacted team, security issues have
taken a lot of the team's time over the past few months
TRY
Reframing Elasticsearch goal as improving admin controls, reduction
in downtime during upgrades, progressive enablement, etc. These
issues allow more incremental progress and don't block improvement
in index size
Reviewing security issues to ensure that we are clearing a backlog,
rather than introducing new issues at the same rate as we fix old
ones
Distribution
GOOD
The whole team is participating in all team projects (both Helm Charts and omnibus-gitlab)
Started with team trainings again which helped the team share knowledge faster
Keeping up with the incoming issues, all projects with open issues are trending down
Exposure of Helm Charts is growing and with that the feedback received
BAD
With the expanded work scope, context switching spiked
Helm Charts are taking majority of the teams time, which impacts the omnibus-gitlab package feature development
Higher complexity of the Helm Charts and the relative immaturity of tooling is making the team less efficient
Due to the new nature of Helm Charts, documentation is still lacking in spite of teams best effort to keep it updated frequently causing confusion with users
TRY
Find a way to remove duplicate work between the omnibus-gitlab package and Helm Charts in regards to introducing new configuration
Focus more on initial installation experience for the new users
Train more teams to be self sufficient with the Helm Charts
Ensure that the omnibus-gitlab package keeps receiving enough attention
Geo
GOOD
Reinstated the monthly team call which was received well by the team.
Cycle time on reviews (done on Geo work by the Geo team) has been reduced by concentrating on making sure that others are unblocked.
The team felt that they accomplished a lot on items like bug fixing, refactoring, performance improvements and documentation.
BAD
Some issues were not as prepared as they could have been and as a result the issues included in the milestone changed a lot during a month.
For some issues we were delayed in waiting for specialized reviewers. We know that there are improvements to the DB review process coming soon, and we look forward to these changes being in place.
We struggled with an erroneous revert as part of the automatic CE->EE merging. It wasn’t immediately clear that the revert had happened.
It was hard to know if some of the QA failures were due to our work or due to work on the QA framework itself. It is difficult and slow to figure out the difference
TRY
We need to spend more time in planning. We will introduce a process in 11.8 and see how this enables us to have more predictable deliverables in a milestone
Manage
GOOD
Stayed within the error budget, something we were nervous about after having an incident so early in the quarter.
We kept focus on deliverables for much of the quarter (e.g SmartCard, Group SAML, Billing improvements), which feels like an achievement given the size and scope of the team.
A decision has been made to create a new team ('Sync'), which will help bring more focus to areas such as Billing & Licensing, while reducing the scope of the Manage team.
Made a conscious decision to prioritize reducing the security backlog in the coming milestones.
The impact of the 201 sessions (now known as Deep Dives) was really positive and has encouraged other teams to do similar.
BAD
Only hired 1 out of 2 positions.
Prioritization of security Issues will impact Deliverables until we clear down the backlog.
Number of Issues delivered was inconsistent for the 3 milestones in the quarter, making it hard to predict future delivery.
TRY
Work closer with the recruitment team, and other engineering teams, to understand what we need to do to speed up hiring.
Experiment with milestone planning to increase both velocity and predictability.
Create
GOOD
Met the hiring target!
No error budget points used
2 people without significant pre-existing Golang experience are now comfortable contributing to our Golang projects
The pressure on and around the feature freeze was reduced by the new policy that allows MRs to be picked into stable after the 7th as long as they have a feature flag.
BAD
1 team member left
3 out of 5 people without significant pre-existing Golang experience did not end up contributing to Golang projects
We continue to overestimate the amount of work we can get done in a month, through underestimating the size of individual issues, resulting in higher pressure around the feature freeze and more slipping to the next release than desirable
Security issues have taken up a significant portion of each of the last few releases, resulting in less time to work on direction features
TRY
Continue to have people without Golang experience work on issues that require them to get familiar with our Golang components (Gitaly, Workhorse)
Break issues down more before scheduling them so that we have a better idea of the amount of work required and we can release them one part at a time, instead of the whole big MR slipping multiple releases in a row
Gitaly
GOOD
Delivered on 100% of OKRs
Hiring finally picked up for team
BAD
Delivered on 100% of OKRs :) Goals probably weren't aggressive enough.
TRY
Setting more aggressive goals, particularly around delivering more rapid
architectural improvements
Gitter
GOOD
Gitter is remaining resilient and stable
Hiring process created and we are looking at candidates now
First version from open source repo of the Gitter Android app published to Google Play Store via GitLab CI, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/gitter-android-app/merge_requests/5
Reduced ~80 MB baseline memory usage by eliminating Linguist dependency
Reduced memory usage of the top 2 worst performing Sidekiq jobs by several gigabytes (UpdateMergeRequestsWorker and ReactiveCachingWorker)
Formalized maintainer role and started reviewing much more code
BAD
OKRs didn't reflect a significant amount of the day-to-day work
Got pulled into scoping and improving audit logging for customer
Implemented Bitbucket Server importer for a customer
Got sidetracked helping many other teams (Geo, Infrastructure, etc.) and fixing production incidents (e.g. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/53153)
TRY
Making OKRs actually reflect work done
Infrastructure
GOOD
We did well with hiring and onboarding
We improved our abilikty to manage workload (even as it still needs more work)
We cleaned up a significant backlog of team issues, which will allow us to fully focus on executing
BAD
OKRs were iffy at best: we treated them like homework rather than a proper management tool
We underestimated our workflow management at scale, which created confusiotn in the team
We failed to communicate new error budget frameork widely
TRY
Finish adopting OKRs and develop the framework of OKRs through GitLab issues
Ensure the OKR -> Epic -> Milestone -> Issue is crystal clear
SAE
GOOD
Hired 3 DBRE's.
Delivered a good percentual of the OKR's and another expressive project that was Patroni.
BAD
We missed an OKR to represent the project of Patroni.
TRY
Improve production best practices, work on better documentation and processes, to avoid self-inflicted outages.
1 queue of issues for all team created information/tracking overload
TRY
Breaking apart team milestones to smaller groups tied to team level OKRs
Small sprint to finish DR work
Andrew
GOOD
Slack alerts to service issues with embedded grafana graphs to help visualise problems and reduce MTTD.
Delivered Correlation IDs. These are already proving very useful in diagnosing productions problems and also in self managed instances. This also formed the basis for distributed tracing, which will be delivered soon.
Abuse detection alerting is being used by the abuse team to detect and stop abuse.
BAD
Delivered two large, unplanned work pieces: Puma/Multithreaded App Server and Google Capacity Planning which were not accounted for in OKR planning or scoring.
More could be done to train team members on how to use new tools
TRY
Adjust OKRs during the quarter if priorities change
Focus on emitting more documentation through blueprints, videos and user documentation.
Ops Backend
GOOD
Completed goals for throughput OKR thanks to the support of the team to try a new model and seeing success with it.
Hired an engineering manager for release. Very happy to welcome Darby Frey to GitLab!
BAD
Did not hire a manager for secure. This has been a tough role to hire for despite our increased efforts in sourcing and filling the pipeline. We are seeing an uptick in the number of interviews in Q1 likely due to the efforts from Q4 but it's disappointing that we are still in search.
TRY
Work with recruiting to diversify and improve our sourcing for the Secure team manager role.
Improve our presence at events and help widen our brand awareness on LinkedIn and other recruiting sites
Monitoring
GOOD
Sourced more candidates than our goal
No error budget points spent
BAD
Only hired 2 out of 3 positions
Didn't meet throughput goal (only 79%)
Didn't spend any error budget points. This is mostly due to our surface area still being so small.
TRY
Encourage smaller MRs merged earlier. Right now we have a number of small MRs, but they are all getting merged late in the cycle.
CI/CD
GOOD
Average throughput was significantly higher than our goal
BAD
Spent double our goal error budget
Only hired one engineer
TRY
More active sourcing and referral seeking to fill roles
Add some structure to how we prioritise and review community MRs to increase throughput
Secure
GOOD
Sourced more candidates then expected (215)
No error budget points spent
Met throughput goal
BAD
Only hired 3 out of 5 positions
TRY
Regarding our rejection ratio, source even more candidates
Configure
GOOD
Hired more than target, thanks to referrals and introductory calls
BAD
Didn't meet the throughput goal (only 87%)
Reluctance to split GitLab issues due to the challenge of splitting our
communication across multiple issues (significant tradeoff with the
extensive async commonunication)
Not a single hire came from an application (all referral and sourced for
introductory calls). Not clear if this is a problem since we exceeded our
hiring target.
TRY
Stress the importance of smaller MRs more also try to make smaller issues
Ask for referrals more, encourage team members to share job ads on Linkedin
Continue our focus on Introductory calls since 6 calls led to 1 hire which
is a good return on investment
Kamil
GOOD
Managed to finish major improvements related to CI scalability: database footprint and fixing Object Storage bugs,
BAD
The amount of OKR tasks didn't really fit into spare time. I was constantly struggling with trying to find time for OKRs while doing regular development / reviews.
TRY
Focus on smaller tasks or define explicitly that OKR is not done in spare time, but rather in 1/3 of time to have better focus on.
Stop (disconnect) other interruptions while working on OKRs.
Philippe
GOOD
Several CFPs were posted, I should have at least one accepted.
BAD
Didn't have time to benchmark any tool. It requires to be focused and
available, which I'm not because of my interim EM position.
TRY
Find a new Secure Engineering Manager to allocate time for my new role OKRs.
Quality
GOOD
Hired two test automation engineers.
Completed Patroni Replication Manager testing with GitLab QA.
Completed TLS Depreciation testing with GitLab QA.
Completed Rails 5 migration testing with GitLab QA.
BAD
An update to the clone / fork button cause GitLab QA tests to break for 4 days.
Review Apps are broken (no DNS record) due to an increasing number of DNS records and too many API calls to AWS.
We had a few high severity regressions were as a result of Rails 5.
We are still lagging behind on test gaps.
TRY
We need to ensure that broken QA tests has the same urgency as a broken master.
Incentivize and encourage engineers to write E2E tests.
Security
GOOD
Public HackerOne bug bounty program rollout in December, with 1 hour first response time to new reports.
Security on-call rotation and automation successfully deployed with SLA of 15 minutes.
Completed initiative of discontinued support of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on GitLab.com.
MTTM for S1/P1 security vulnerabilities consistently meets 30 day timeframe.
Biweekly application security office hours have been helpful so far.
BAD
Security releases, both critical and non-critical continue to be a challenge, with regression issues for previously hotpatched issues on GitLab.com.
MTTM of S2/P2 security issues are not consistently meeting 60 day timeframe.
TRY
Work with release delivery and management team to address security release issues.
Deploy mandatory onboarding secure coding training for all new (and existing) developers, to lower overall vulnerable code.
Support
GOOD
Positive team reaction to workflow changes to improve SLA response. Impressive KPI results with FRT trending close to 95% by EOQ.
Good cross-team coordination with Recruiting and hiring to plan.
Completed upgrade to Zendesk Enterprise and initial update to Zendesk workflows.
BAD
Experience factor review process had unnecessary friction suggesting iteration for a smoother Compensation process.
Although hiring goals were met we need to partner with Recruiting to lessen time to hire new roles.
TRY
More effectively surface common product challenges from customers into Product.
Smoother customer on-boarding with Sales (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/issues/1323)
Americas East
GOOD
First Response Hawk Process is improving SLAs
Team adopted more async workflows (Issue boards/Week-in-revew doc)
Offboarded APAC Support team to new manager successfully.
Will C. Developed Strace-parser which has helped tremendously with customer performance debugging.
BAD
We need more Geo Expertise.
Support Fix and Documentation processes were not as clearly defined as they should be which lead to delays and friction in using them.
TRY
Better communication and collaboration with docs to get changes merged in faster, more accurately.
Develop FRT Hawk Tooling to improve efficiency
Get other regions to use strace-parser through better training and documentation.
Americas West
GOOD
Hired to target
Have a solid first iteration on .com Engineering onboarding and clear next steps
.com performance in December was exceptional (after our BAD day)
Adhoc pairing sessions have reduced breaches and increased team knowledge
BAD
Weekend merge of a 4-hr SLA on Premium left the .com team scrambling
Coverage gap left .com with a 0% SLA day in December (only 1 ticket actually breached)
TRY
Have .com team members play the role of CMOC in the incident management process
Rotate through "FRT Hawk" role throughout team
APAC
GOOD
Manager hired for the region
BAD
Length of time to recruit manager for APAC
TRY
Define regional hours of coverage with the team and cover appropriately
Participate in the "FRT Hawk" role once completed in Americas
Define framework for multi-language support
EMEA
GOOD
Hired 2 Support Agents per target
Focused learning objectives for team with quarterly learning goals
Groundwork for knwledge sharing, documentation updates, search and tracking
Streamline Zendesk configuration to improve agent efficienc
BAD
Tracking of knowledge capture and documentation updates not yet in place
Frontend search of knowledge to deflect support tickets not yet in place
TRY
Track documentation updates and knowledge sharing by Support
Implement search of knowledge to deflect support tickets and track effectiveness
Continue to streamline and improve Zendesk configuration with help of Support Operations specialist when hired.
UX
GOOD
We developed and finalized an MVC for both group and instance level clusters with collaboration between UX, Frontend, Backend, and Product.
We also created another user journey towards creating a project cluster by introducing the Serverless tab. This navigates users towards the cluster page if they do not already have one. This was a joint effort between the Configure team and Triggermesh (a contracted group).
Completed a comprehensive competitor analysis of version control tools for designers.
Hired 2 UX Designers.
BAD
While we pushed for group and instance level clusters to be implemented, instance level clusters did not make it in Q4. The team did not have capacity.
Didn't hire a UX Manager.
TRY
Better defining what we want and need from UX Managers.
Research
GOOD
We launched GitLab First Look, a new comprehensive research program for users of GitLab. Users are now able to sign-up to beta testing with GitLab.
Great collaboration with Product and Marketing.
BAD
Due to the holidays, some of the features we planned to beta test missed RCs/11.6 release therefore we've not had the opportunity to test out and re-iterate on our beta testing process.
TRY
Test the beta testing process for features in 11.7
