Contributor Success Team

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4. Contributor Success Team

Maintained by:

Nick Veenhof

@nick_vh

On this page

• Common Links
• Sub-pages
• Strategy
• Mission
  • FY23 Direction
    • Unique New Monthly Contributors
    • Community Contributed Value Observability
    • Community Metrics Foreshadowing
    • Open Community MR Age (OCMA)
    • Leading Organizations
• Team Responsibilities
• Team Members
  • File an issue
    • gitlab-org/gitlab
    • gitlab-org/quality/contributor-success/team-task
• Project Management
• OKRs
  • Current quarter
  • Previous quarter (FY23Q4)
• Performance Indicators
  • Unique Wider Community Contributors per Month
  • Open Community MR Age (OCMA)
  • MRARR
  • Community Coaches per Month
  • Community Contribution MRs as Features per Month
  • How do we collaborate with other teams?
    • Structure
• Contributor Growth stand-up

Common Links

Sub-pages

Strategy

This team directly follows the strategy outlined in our open source growth strategy.

Mission

The goal of the team is to increase the technical improvements and efficiency of our contribution process to sustain our ambition of 1000+ contributors with merged MRs per month to GitLab.

FY23 Direction

In FY23 we will be focused on growing the number of unique new monthly contributors, reducing Open Community MR Age (OCMA) and increasing MRARR. This will increase development velocity without requiring additional engineering resources.

Parallel to this we'll increase observability of community contributed value through improving the business intelligence around it. This will allow us to create some predictability through foreshadowing. These efforts are cross-functional and require working together with Marketing and Product Development. This accounts for 70 - 80% of the workload. The remaining 20 - 30% is ad-hoc work. The ad-hoc work is eclectic and ranges from supporting customers on contributions, supporting various open source initiatives and supporting the Engineering Productivity team.

Unique New Monthly Contributors

1. Minimize reliance on human interaction
2. Reduce volatility through introducing automations that drive contributions forward automatically
3. Capitalize on untapped potential - MRs that have become stale but have received a seal of approval as useful addition to GitLab.
4. Invest into attracting more new contributors

Community Contributed Value Observability

1. Introduce measurement points in various places in the contribution pipeline
2. Collect objective and subjective feedback from contributors about the process
3. Create insight into actual community contribution pipeline size
4. Standardize contribution MRARR valuation
5. Categorize contribution and measure value per type

Community Metrics Foreshadowing

1. Predict community metric trends
2. Empower teams to react to negative trends before they actualize
3. Define ambitious targets for FY24

Open Community MR Age (OCMA)

1. Minimize reliance on human factors that contribute to a large standard deviation
2. Identify & drive tooling improvements to decrease OCMA, and collaborate with the Engineering Productivity team through shared tooling for automated triaging

Leading Organizations

The GitLab Leading Organizations program is a cross-functional initiative that is led by the Contributor Success team and Community Relations team.

The Leading Organization program supports GitLab's mission by recognizing and incentivizing organizations who are among our most active contributors. A company or individual qualifies for unique benefits by reaching 20 merged merge requests or more over a trailing three full calendar month basis.

See our workflows on how to add or remove an organization to the program.

Team Responsibilities

• Improve GitLab's Contribution Efficiency and merge request coaching process.
• Contribute as a merge request coach in one or more specialties by providing guidance to community contributors on technical and non-technical aspects.
• Be a point of escalation for community contributors and identify GitLab DRIs to resolve blockers.
• Organize community contributors into community teams and ensure their success.
• Track contribution delivery of the Community Contributors and Cohorts.
• Nominate impactful community contributors and contributions for recognition.
• Collaborate closely with our Marketing counterparts and Core team.
• Engineering representative that can ride along with the Developer evangelist and Code contributor program manager.
• Improve community recognition system and awards in collaboration with the Community Relations team.
• Participate in GitLab's overall Engineering open source outreach events and processes.

Team Members

File an issue

gitlab-org/gitlab

All issues that relate to the Open Source project GitLab and that can serve to enhance the contributor flow and are public by nature should be created here by default. We aim to not have any distinction between contributors or GitLab team-members for which we expect by default that everyone should be able to contribute to.

• Location: gitlab-org/gitlab
• Required label: Contributor Success

gitlab-org/quality/contributor-success/team-task

All issues that relate to the inner working of the company GitLab, including specific internal team workings, onboardings-issues or issues relating to customers that should be separated from the Open Source project GitLab can be placed here.

• Location: gitlab-org/quality/contributor-success/team-task
• Required label: Contributor Success

Project Management

• Our team project is our single source of truth for all tasks & backlog.
• Epics that contain cross-functional work across multiple departments can be created at the gitlab-org level.

OKRs

Every quarter, the team commits to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The below links to our current and previous quarter OKRs, it updates automatically as the quarter progresses.

Note: Due to the switch to GitLab's OKR system, we no longer have the ability to view the OKRs from FY23Q4. A hard-copy was made of the state of these OKRs as of 2023-01-30.

Current quarter

Contributor Success FY24 Q1 OKR Overview

Previous quarter (FY23Q4)

• Obj: Scale the Community through a contributor event, mentoring & onboarding of customers, 83%
  • KR: 30 MR creation-to-review sessions. 53%
  • KR: Onboard 15 Leading Organizations with a contribution workshop, 73%
  • KR: Organize GitLab Contribution Days, 88%
  • KR: Increase monthly unique to 140, 70%
• Obj: Increase Contribution Value by increasing collaboration and increasing recognition, 89%
  • KR: Recognize all GitLab team members weekly, 92%
  • KR: Recognize community reviewers monthly, 75%
  • KR: Get 12 MRs reviewed by the wider community, 100%
• Obj: Grow & Bootstrap the team through an improved hiring process & talent assessment, 100%
  • KR: Execute Talent assessment with all team members. 100%
  • KR: All team members to complete the Best-In-Class training, 100%
  • KR: Hire 1 Person, 100%

Performance Indicators

We have the following Performance Indicators

Unique Wider Community Contributors per Month

• Target: increase to be greater than 150 per month by FY23Q4
• Activities:
  • Partnership with Community Relations and Technical Marketing team.
  • Hold community office hours
  • Hold hackathons
  • Allow running of QA tests from forks
  • Shorten the CI runtime for community contributions (in forks)

Open Community MR Age (OCMA)

• Target: decrease to lower than 30 days by FY23Q4
• Activities:
  • Shorten CI time
  • Improve Community Contribution automation
  • Enable running QA tests on forks
  • Increase number of coaches
  • Partner with Engineering Productivity to provide feedback to improve contribution tooling (currently GDK).

MRARR

• Target: increase to 400M MR$ by FY23Q4
• Activities:
  • Reach out to top tier enterprise customers
  • Help take-on inactive customer contribution to completion & merge
  • Partner with CSMs to enlist and facilitate contribution from customers
  • Launch contribution materials targeting large enterprises
  • Partner with Community relations team (David P)
  • Maintain a list of known contributors with a mapping to their accounts and the accounts ARR contribution as input to this KPI

Please see Contributing Orgs tracker for details how to onboard or offboard a GitLab account from being linked to a customer account, and being counted into the MRARR metric.

Community Coaches per Month

• Target: increase to be greater than 50 per month by FY23Q3
• Activities:
  • Work with Development Department (Christopher L, VP of Development) for volunteers.
  • Work with UX Department (Christie L, VP of UX) Christie for volunteers.
  • Refresh MR coaches as “Community coaches” so non-code review work can be encouraged (design, etc)
  • Launch training materials for coaches

Community Contribution MRs as Features per Month

• Target: increase to 30% by FY23Q2
• Activities:
  • Encourage features at Community relations hackathons.
  • Published list of feature issues with Marketing team.

How do we collaborate with other teams?

There are several teams across various reporting structures that work on making the GitLab Community great.

Structure

Contributor Growth stand-up

The purpose of this stand-up is to collaborate cross-functionally between various teams and GitLab team members on initiatives for how to reach our goal of 1000 contributors per month. This is a subset of the User Engagement top initiative: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com-top-initiatives/-/epics/8

• Agenda - https://docs.google.com/document/d/11S48qIoFzKxZAdMznlUm5-Pob4EEBb8DNv2YIBLw9uw/edit
• Legacy Agenda - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AOgqaslnq-WI1ICSZ1NzSnALf1Va4D5qAD191icAoSI/edit#