As a Support Manager at GitLab, you will be focusing on the following things:
You can read more about the role below:
Some teams have slight tactical differences, you can see distinctive of regional approaches on the following pages:
The Support Team uses Epics to track and coordinate ongoing projects. For the master epics, a Support manager will be assigned as a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) you will see their name in parentheses after the Epic title.
As a larger leadership team, it's important that we remain in constant communication to ensure that we're building relationships and avoiding siloing. You can read more about how we run our Leadership syncs in our handbook.
While managers won't generally directly participate in Senior Leadership Meetings, it's important to know they exist, what topics are discussed at what cadence and where the public agenda is. Read more about Senior Leadership Meetings.
See Support Hiring
As a Support Management group we should be aware of the tooling we use to generate the metrics that we report on.
Sisense is a general purpose visualization tool that is used by the greater company. It's extremely powerful with a full SQL interface to our data across functions. We work with the data team to generate "Stable" Graphs here. Think, KPIs and greater measures that make sense to report to the larger company. As managers, we will not need to edit these reports often, but we should consuming it regularly.
Zendesk Explore was released to replace Zendesk Insights. We will use this tool for quick interactions on new ideas or fact checking Sisense data. Support Managers should be ready to work with Explore regularly and be comfortable with the tool.
Sisense is a company wide tool that is extremely powerful which can make it unwieldy. Explore gives us an interface that is much easier to navigate and use. Additionally, Sisense data is a secondary source so it can contain errors. By being comfortable using ZD Explore, a primary source, we can make sure that we have accurate data and insights.
Each week in the Support Leadership Meetings we'll review the key metrics.
If the metrics are at or below the following floors for 2 sustained weeks, managers should form a group to analyze the cause and suggest actions to correct the trend.
This action is unique to Support and is somewhere in-between a Rapid Action issue and a Working Group.
The purpose of the group will be unique to each situation that triggers it, but generally the members will:
These criteria and actions came from the Metrics Analysis Workgroup.
All Support Engineering Managers have at least 1 OKR each quarter. Each managers' OKR should align with one of the department level OKR's, although the scope may be smaller (confined to a region/team of direct reports rather than globally impactful). While OKR's are important, they are not the most important thing for managers to work on. To the end of effectively managing Support Engineers, a managers focus should be on:
Having a project that is time bound to a quarter is completely acceptable as an OKR, and adjusting an OKR during the quarter (especially in light of other priorities) is also acceptable.
New managers will establish their own OKR after they have been in their role for a full financial quarter, allowing time for them to complete onboarding and see the OKR process in action.
Support Engineering Manager READMEs are found in Engineering Manager READMEs.