Recognition in Engineering

Engineering Quarterly Achievers

Quarterly, CTO Leadership will recognize Engineering team members who have excelled in a given quarter. Recognition includes:

• an invitation to the Engineering Quarterly Achievers Chat
• participation in the Engineering Quarterly Achiever’s Recognition Dinner - an expensed meal for yourself, friends and family to celebrate your work, the meal must occur before the last day of the quarter following the announcement. Winners each quarter have until the last day of the quarter to submit for reimbursement. Winners may submit their receipt for the meal for reimbursement via Navan. Please see the instructions below.

In Navan, click Add Transaction Select Upload receipt (or select Type in details) Under Expense Type field, please select “Team events & meals” Under Classification, please select “FY24 Team Building” Under Description field, please include this link: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/recognition/#engineering-quarterly-achievers-recognition-dinner Click Submit (or Save & close if you need to come back to add more information).

Engineering Quarterly Achiever’s Chat

The Quarterly Achiever’s Chat recognizes Engineering team members who have excelled in a given quarter by inviting them to join the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technical Officer and Chief Product Officer in a congratulatory chat. The benefit is three-fold:

1. Top performers receive facetime and recognition directly at the executive level
2. Knowledge sharing of best practices that can be replicated by other Engineering team members
3. Leaders/teams outside of the Engineering organization gain visibility into successes

Key features of this call include:

• 30-minute call
• Held within first two months of new quarter
• CEO, CFO, CTO and/or CProdO attendance required
• Not recorded

Engineering Quarterly Achiever’s Recognition Dinner

As part of this initiative, Engineering Quarterly Achievers are able to expense a meal up to $250.00 USD within the same quarter they were selected in. For example, if a team member is selected as a Quarterly Achiever in November, they must expense their meal before the end of Q4 (the last day in January). Please submit your meal expense in Navan and in the description field link to this section of the handbook for approval.

The $250.00 USD is reimbursable for a meal only, other items do not qualify.

Categories

In total, 14 team members from across the Engineering organization will be recognized. The categories by segment for FY24-Q4 include:

Engineering Efficiency

1. Best Blueprint Proposal Award - awarded to individuals who submit well thought-out, technically-sound proposals on items that require cross-functional communication and influence
2. Cost Savings Award - awarded to individuals who significantly contribute towards reducing costs
3. Software Efficiency Award - awarded to individuals who implement an abstraction, pattern, or library that makes future development efforts much more efficient
4. Proactive Avoidance Award - awarded to individuals who raise concerns about things before they become disastrous incidents
5. Security Improvement Award - awarded to individuals who implement security features or defense in depth pattern to provide a more secure DevSecOps enviornment for everyone

Engineering Excellence

1. Engineering Excellence Award - awarded to individuals who develop an innovative idea/approach to an existing problem, and successfully gather wider support within the organization
2. Excellence Under Pressure Award - awarded to individuals who keep a cool head while methodically solving high-impact incidents
3. Testing Excellence Award - awarded to individuals whose efforts allow us to release with confidence and high quality
4. Most Impactful MR or Doc Update Award - recognition for a contribution with a far reaching effect
5. Everyone-can-contribute Award - awarded to individuals who step across department lines to make things better than they were before

Customer Results

1. Customer-centered Individual Award - awarded to individuals who take ownership of high-impact customer escalations, coordinate stakeholders and build trusting relationships with our customers as they walk the path to a satisfactory resolution
2. Customer Kudos Award - awarded to an individual who a customer recognized as an extraordinary contributor in their feedback
3. Performance and Scalability Award - awarded to individuals who contribute significantly towards a performance or scalability improvement that benefits our customers.
4. Contribution to Sales or Renewal Award - awarded to an individual who assisted in quarterly revenue generating activity - nominated by a member of Sales, CS or Renewals

Categories are reevaluated by CTO leadership and changed as necessary.

Selection Criteria

Considerations include:

1. The team member operates within GitLab and in their particular area of achievement in concordance with GitLab Values
2. The team member has not won a Quarterly Achiever award within the current fiscal year

Engineering Quarterly Achievers Timeline

1. 2 Weeks prior to quarter start, a call for nominations goes out in the Engineering Week in Review, and Slack. See Communicating for the list of channels.
2. Engineering Quarterly Achievers finalized within the first week of the new quarter by CTO leadership
3. Engineering Quarterly Achievers announced and recognized in the first Engineering All-Hands of the quarter
4. Engineering Quarterly Achievers Chat held within the quarter
5. CEO, CTO, and CPO to congratulate and inquire about key learnings from achievers on call
6. CEO, CTO, and CPO to pull out 2-3 of the most impactful key learnings and share with the larger team in a Slack post (either #ceo or #cto) after the call

Engineering Quarterly Achievers Nominations

Prior to the start of the quarter, a call for nominations will go out. You may nominate as many people as you wish, provided they meet the selection criteria.

Engineering Quarterly Achievers Past Winners

FY24-Q4

Quarter	Category	Award	Winner
FY24-Q4	Efficiency	Best Blueprint Proposal	Samil Hiltunen
FY24-Q4	Efficiency	Cost Savings	Rehab Hassanein
FY24-Q4	Efficiency	Software Efficiency	Adam Hegyi
FY24-Q4	Efficiency	Proactive Avoidance	Marius Bobin
FY24-Q4	Excellence	Engineering Excellence	Jason Plum
FY24-Q4	Excellence	Excellence Under Pressure	Corinna Gogolok
FY24-Q4	Excellence	Testing Excellence	Not Awarded
FY24-Q4	Excellence	Most Impactful MR or Doc Update	Simon Street
FY24-Q4	Excellence	Everyone-can-contribute	John Lyttle
FY24-Q4	Customer Results	Customer Centered Individual	Daphne Kua
FY24-Q4	Customer Results	Customer Kudos	Suleimi Ahmed
FY24-Q4	Customer Results	Performance and Stability	Brie Carranza & Matthew Badeau
FY24-Q4	Customer Results	Contribution to Sales or Renewal	Gerardo Gutierrez

FY25-Q1

Quarter	Category	Award	Winner
FY25-Q1	Efficiency	Best Blueprint Proposal	Not Awarded
FY25-Q1	Efficiency	Cost Savings	Tomasz Maczukin
FY25-Q1	Efficiency	Software Efficiency	Not Awarded
FY25-Q1	Efficiency	Proactive Avoidance	Andreas Brandl
FY25-Q1	Efficiency	Security Improvement	David Fernandez
FY25-Q1	Excellence	Engineering Excellence	Not Awarded
FY25-Q1	Excellence	Excellence Under Pressure	Matt Smiley
FY25-Q1	Excellence	Testing Excellence	Mark Lapierre
FY25-Q1	Excellence	Most Impactful MR or Doc Update	Not Awarded
FY25-Q1	Excellence	Everyone-can-contribute	John Skarbek
FY25-Q1	Customer Results	Customer Centered Individual	Samir Hafez
FY25-Q1	Customer Results	Customer Kudos	Jio Castillo
FY25-Q1	Customer Results	Performance and Stability	Sylvester Chin
FY25-Q1	Customer Results	Contribution to Sales or Renewal	Cameron Swords

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Engineering Quarterly Achievers Process

This process is followed by a delegate of the CTO Leads team at least 2 weeks before the end of the quarter, and is completed before the first all hands of the quarter.

Accepting Nominations

1. Create a copy of the Engineering Quarterly Achievers Nomination Form - Template in the Awards [Quarterly] folder on Drive. If you do not have access, ask the CTO’s EBA for access.
2. Make sure to add any new categories.
3. In the “Responses” tab, click “Link to Sheets” to collect responses in a Google Sheet rather than in the form itself.
4. In the “Responsess” tab, toggle “Accepting responses” on, and toggle it off when nominations close.

Communicating

1. Create a Field Operations - Enablement issue (example) to get permission to post in #field-fyi for the “Contribution to Sales or Renewal” Award. This should be completed at least 2 weeks prior to launching the nomination period.
   • Consider posting a pre-filled link that selects that specific award.
2. In the Engineering Week in Review, add a note that nominations are open with a link to the form.
3. Make a Slack post in #engineering-fyi. Cross-post in #cto, and #eng-managers.
4. Consider posting reminders 1 week, and 1 day before due date.

Selecting Winners

1. Pull the raw data from the nominations sheet and put it in a copy of Engineering Quarterly Achievers Nominees Selection - TEMPLATE. It’s easier to collaborate on a Google Doc than a Google Sheet.
   • You can consider using process-quarterly-achievers.rb to process the data.
2. Make a copy of the Engineering Quarterly Achievers All Hands Deck - TEMPLATE
3. Follow the instructions in the template:
   • Choose DRIs for each area from among CTO Leads
   • Empower CTO Leads to make decisions
   • Direct CTO Leads to update the deck with names, photos and speaker notes that highlight the nomination.

Announce Winners

For the next All-Hands, incorporate the final slides into primary deck! After All-hands, update this page with names of winners. Wooo! You’re done until next quarter.