Priorities

I’m the director of development for the secure, govern, data science, and growth sub-departments.

In addition to leading development for these development sub-departments, I also focus on:

Protecting GitLab from attackers
Coordinating escalations for specific large customers
Public speaking on various topics
Mentoring inside and outside of GitLab

Prioritization and results philosphy

Teams determine high confidence due dates on the highest priority items.
Teams do a blameless RCA if those due dates are significantly missed.
Teams say no to or deprioritize lower priority things in order to deliver results on the highest priority items.
Teams depend on their stable counterparts in product management, quality, and design to help with deciding on priorities and then achieving them
Teams publish weekly updates on the highest priority items to keep the focus on them and to keep them on track

Background

I’m a veteran of three successful startups (including GitLab) and have experience in multiple areas, including healthcare, finance, and security.

Links about Wayne:

How to collaborate with Wayne

I subscribe to servant-leadership
Continuous learning is fundamental to me. I read approximately one book weekly and aspire to take one online class every month.
I subscribe to the philosophy of “saying what you are going to do and doing what you say.”
I am an advocate for remote work because it is highly effective for both the company and the individual.
At work, nothing makes me happier than when:
- A user benefits from a change developed by my team
- A prospect becomes a customer because of a feature developed by my team.
- A team member learns something new and expands their horizons
- A process or procedure, or technology is improved that benefits the overall company, team members, or the technology industry as a whole
I prefer to use this 1-1 format
I do skip-level meetings with those who work for my direct reports every three months. I am always available for ad-hoc discussions as well.
Some of my favorite business books include:
I am in Atlanta, GA, USA (Eastern US).
I am most productive in the morning.
When reaching out to me, my preferences are:
- Tag me in a merge request
- Tag me in an issue
- Tag me in a message in a Slack channel
- Send me a 1:1 message in Slack
- Send me an email
I prefer that, when feasible, all recorded meetings should be made public on GitLab Unfiltered. I continue to be pleaseantly surprised by how this can increase collaboration inside and outside the team.
I always try to explain the “why". Engineers are often asked to focus on the “what” and “how”. However, explaining the "why" makes sure they are engaged and also enables the engineers to find better ways to achieve the goals.

Engineering Director shadow program

I created and continue to operate the Engineering director shadow program, which allows anyone at GitLab to shadow me for a week and provides mentoring, learning opportunities, and career development exploration.

Dashboards I use

I use these dashboards to inform me on metrics for my teams:

Corresponding handbook pages:

What I am working on improving

Please be an accountability partner for me on the following items:

When I make requests or ask questions, always include the priority and expected time frames
Avoid asking questions in public formus that inadvertently create high priority work because they are interpreted as high priority because I am asking (when that is not what I intended)
Use my standing desk at least two hours a day.

2023 Q1 OKRs

OKR Search

Themes:

Application health: Error budgets, Rails upgrade, Vue upgrade, Improve observability
Team member career growth: Training, Yearly assessment followup, Complete Best In Class (BIC) gap analysis
Mature the Platform to be the leading DevSecOps platform: Use GitLab for OKRs, Team MR rate
Increase revenue by growing a customer result mindset and delivering results: Key secure/govern/data science feature delivery, Reduce customer facing bugs, Stay ahead of SLA on security issues

Wayne Haber's README

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