Calendar Year 2018 Q2 OKRs

CEO: Grow Incremental ACV according to plan. 120% of plan, pipeline 3x minus in quarter, 100% at 70% of quota.

• CMO: Build 3x minus in quarter pipeline for Q3. % of plan achieved.
  • MSD: Generate sufficient demand to support our IACV targets. % of opportunity value creation target achieved.
    • SDR: Support efficient inbound demand creation. Achieve 110% of SAO plan.
    • Content: Publish content on the marketing site to accelrate inbound demand. Publish v2 of /customers. Publish /devops.
    • Content: Execute DevOps integrated campaign to support SDR and Field Marketing demand generation. Produce 2 webinars with 500 registrants. Distribute Gary Gruver’s book to 600 people.
    • Field Marketing: Develop account based marketing strategies to deploy in support of Regional Director territory plans. Generate 41% of opportunity creation target worth of referral sourced opportunities.
    • Field Marketing: Execute on field event plan, pre, during, and post event. Generate 12% of opportunity creation target worth of opportunity sourced through field events.
    • Marketing Ops: Improve campaign tracking. Track UTM parameter values in salesforce.com for closed loop reporting in salesforce.com.
    • Marketing Ops: Improve trial experience and trial engagement. Launch new email nurture series educating trial requesters on EEU. Increase trial to opportunity conversion rate by 20%.
    • Online Growth: Extend SEO/PPC/Digital Advertising programs. Generate 31% of opportunity creation target worth of opportunity originating from the marketing site. Increase the amount of traffic to about.gitlab.com by 10% compared to last quarter.
    • Online Growth: Evaluate and build out ROIDNA CRO project. Increase GitLab EEU trial sign-ups by 15%. Increase GitLab EE downloads by 15%.
    • SCA: Support self serve SMB business. Achieve 130% of SMB IACV plan.
    • SDR: Generate outbound opportunity value. Source 16% of opportunity creation target worth of opportunity through outbound prospecting.
  • PMM: Complete messaging roll-out and activation to include: Sales, Partner and Marketing enablement, tier plans specific messaging and positioning, demo aligned to new positioning and messaging, presenting new messaging at key conferences.
  • PMM: Optimize trial sign-up, trial enablement and trial period experience, including the addition of GitLab.com trial and enhance trial nurture program.
  • PMM: Submit strong submission for Gartner Application Release Orchestration (ARO) MQ and contribute to SCM Market Guide update and continue briefing sweep with all key Gartner and Forrester analysts.
  • Outreach: Raise awareness. Double active evangelists. Launch education program. Double number of likes/upvotes/replies.
  • Outreach: Keep being an open source project. Increase active committers by 50%
  • Outreach: Get open source projects to use GitLab. Convert 3 large projects to self-managed GitLab.
• CMO: Enough opportunities for strategic account leaders. Make the Q2 SCLAU forecast.
  • MSD: Achieve SCLAU volume target. Inbound SCLAU generation and outbound SCLAU generation.
    • SDR: Achieve SDR SCLAU volume targets. % of revised Q2 SDR targets.
    • Field Marketing: Achieve Field Marketing SCLAU volume targets. % of revised Q2 Field Marketing targets.
    • SDR: Achieve SDR SCLAU volume targets. % of revised Q2 SDR targets.
• CRO: 120% of plan achieved.
• CRO: Success Plans for all eligible customers.
  • Customer Success: Enabling a transition to Transformational Selling
    • Solutions Architects: Each Solutions Architect record video’s of top 5 specialized use cases (including pitching services), reviewed by Customer Success leadership team.
    • Customer Success Managers: Do a quarterly business review for all eligible customers
    • Professional Services Engineering: 75% of Big and Jumbo opportunities include Professional Services line item
  • Customer Success: 80% of opportunities advanced to stage 4 (Proposal) from stage 3 (Technical Evaluation) stage based on guided POC’s.
    • Solutions Architects: 100% of Solutions Architect team members participate in at least 1 guided POC.
    • Customer Success Managers: 100% of TAM team members participate in at least 1 guided POC.
    • Professional Services Engineering: Create top 3 integration demonstration / test systems (LDAP, Jenkins, JIRA).
• CRO: Effective sales organization. 70% of salespeople are at 100% of quota.
  • Dir Channel: Increase Channel ASP by 50%
  • Dir Channel: Triple number of resellers above “Authorized Level”
  • Dir Channel: Implement VAR program (SHI, Insight, SoftwareOne, etc)
  • Sales Ops: Complete MEDDPIC sales methodology training. Account Executives and Account Managers should be proficient in capturing all MEDDPIC data points.
  • Sales Ops: Collaborate with Regional Directors to improve our conversion process in the earlier stages, more specifically between 1-Discovery and 2-Scoping as this is historically our lowest conversion.
  • Sales Ops: Complete 1:1 relationship between Accounts, Billing Accounts, and Subscription, where applicable. This will ensure a much cleaner CRM.
• CFO: Compliant operations. 3 projects completed.
  • Legal: GDPR policy fully implemented.
  • Legal: Contract management system for non-sales related contracts.
  • Billing Specialist: Add cash collection, application and compensation to job responsibilities.
• VPE
  • Director of Support
    • Support Engineering: 100% SLA achievement for premium self-managed customers => 81%
    • Support Engineering: Document and implement severity-based ticket processing workflow for self-managed customers => 90%
    • Support Services: 100% SLA achievement for GitLab.com customers => 94%
    • Support Services: Develop and document Support Services workflows, processes, and automation needed to deliver world-class customer support => 90%

CEO: Popular next generation product. Ship first iteration of the complete DevOps lifecycle, GitLab.com uptime, zero click cluster demo.

• VP Product
  • Product: Ship first iteration of GitLab for the complete DevOps lifecycle.
  • Product: Create a dashboard of usage of features. Replace Redash with Looker.
  • Product: Identify causes of free and paid churn on GitLab.com.
• CFO: Make progress on having public clouds run us. 2 running everything.
  • Dir. Partnerships: Sign agreement to migrate target OS project
  • Dir. Partnerships: Strategic cloud partner chooses GitLab SCM for an offering
  • Dir. Partnerships: Successfully track and present data on the usage touch points for attribution tracking of our cloud agreement
• CTO: Make sure cloud native installation, PaaS and cluster work well. Zero clicks.
• CTO: Make sure we use our own features. Monitoring, CE review app, Auto DevOps for version and license.
• CTO: Jupyter integrated into GitLab. Hub deploy to cluster and Lab works with GitLab.
• VPE: Make GitLab.com ready for mission critical customer workloads (99.95% availability) => Rebuilding the team went well. Availability was marred by several incidents, particularly with the database. The GCP project was delayed several times, but now appears to be on a trajectory to complete.
  • Eng Fellow: Improve monitoring by shipping 5 alerts that catch critical GitLab problems
  • UX: Deliver three UX Ready experience improvements per release towards reducing the installation time of DevOps. => 100%
  • UX: Deliver three UX Ready experience improvements per release towards onboarding and authentication on gitlab.com.. => 66%
  • Quality: Deliver the first iteration of engineering dashboard charts and metrics. => 100% done, dashboard is up and running.
  • Quality: Complete the organization of files, directories and LoC into /ee/ directory. = 70% done, remaining work scoped with issues created. Javascript and LoC are the most challenging areas.
  • Security: Automated enforcement of GCP Security Guidelines => 90%, full completion dependent on post GCP migration
  • Security: Design, document, and implement security release process and craft epic with S1 & S2 issues and present to product for prioritization => 100%, security release process
  • Frontend: Deliver 100% of committed issues per release (10.8: 30/38 deliverables, 4/12 stretch; 11.0: 32/39 deliverables, 1/12 stretch; 11.1: 37/47 deliverables, 10/20 stretch)
  • Frontend: Integrate the first 3 reusable Vue components based on design.gitlab.com
  • Dev Backend: Define KPIs and build monitoring for release cycle performance => 90%. Prototype working but not shipped.
  • Dev Backend: Create first iteration of engineering management training materials and merge into handbook => 100%
    • Platform: Deliver 100% of committed issues per release (overall: 41/55 (75%) deliverables, 7/39 stretch; 10.8: 15/21 deliverables, 1/14 stretch; 11.0: 12/17 deliverables, 3/13 stretch; 11.1: 14/17 deliverables, 3/12 stretch)
    • Platform: Ship first GraphQL endpoint to be used by an existing frontend component => 80%, endpoint is shipped, but some more advanced features still need to be added
    • Discussion: Deliver 100% of committed issues per release (overall: 32/39 deliverables, 19/30 stretch; 10.8: 9/10 deliverables, 6/6 stretch; 11.0: 12/14 deliverables, 7/11 stretch; 11.1: 11/15 deliverables, 6/13 stretch)
    • Discussion: Make GitLab a Rails 5 app by default => handful of issues remaining; working on plan for default to customers in 11.3
    • Distribution: Deliver 100% of committed issues per release (10.8: 16/16 deliverables, 1/5 stretch; 11.0: 9/9 deliverables, 1/1 stretch; 11.1: 13/13 deliverables, 2/4 stretch)
    • Distribution: Increase integration test coverage of HA setup => 100% done. End to end HA setup is run on every nightly build and on every release.
    • Geo: Deliver 100% of committed issues per release (10.8: 10/20 deliverables, 3/8 stretch; 11.0: 8/10 deliverables, 2/2 stretch; 11.1: 9/14 deliverables, 0/1 stretch)
    • Geo: Test and perform multi-node secondary failover on GitLab.com to GCP
  • Ops Backend: Design and implement a hiring pool process for Ops backend (possibly in collaboration with Dev Backend) => 100% done (first iteration). Great collaboration with Dev Backend to implement the new hiring pool process.
  • Ops Backend: Goal #2
    • CI/CD: Deliver 100% of committed issues per release (10.8: 27/38 deliverables, 3/10 stretch; 11.0: 39/46 deliverables, 14/25 stretch; 11.1: 9/16 deliverables, 2/6 stretch) => 75% for deliverables, 46% for stretch
    • CI/CD: Cover demo of Auto DevOps with GitLab QA => 100%
    • Monitoring: Deliver 100% of committed issues per release (10.8: 7/16 deliverables, 0/5 stretch; 11.0: 9/15 deliverables, 0/5 stretch; 11.1: 10/15 deliverables, 0/5 stretch) => (57%)
    • Monitoring: Publish official Grafana dashboards (50% complete, first iteration merged)
    • Security Products: Gemnasium infrastructure moved to GitLab => 100%, Gemnasium has been shutdown on May 15th, and everything required for Dependency Scanning migrated to GKE.
  • Infrastructure
    • Production: Move to GCP in April - 0% done - now targeting end of July.
    • Database: Improve application performance: 45% done
    • Database: Improve monitoring, configuration, and knowledge of our infrastructure: 57% done
    • Database: Improve team structure and workflow: 100% done
    • Gitaly: Ship v1.0 and turn off NFS => 80%. We got a lot closer to shipping 1.0 but still haven’t delivered.
    • Gitaly: Get to v1.1 remove rugged code => 0%. Didn’t ship 1.0 which is a prerequisite.

CEO: Great team. Active recruiting for all vacancies, number of diverse per vacancy, real-time dashboard.

• CCO: Active recruiting. 100% of vacancies have outbound sourcing.
• CCO: Increase double diverse candidates (underrepresented and low rent index). At least one qualified diverse candidate interviewed for each vacancy.
• CCO: Increase leadership aptitude and effectiveness for the executive team. At least one training per month, one leadership book per quarter, and improvement in 360 feedback.
• CFO: Real-time dashboard for everything in the Metrics sheet. 100% of metrics.
  • Legal: Scalable solution for hiring added in at least 5 countries.
  • Controller: Close cycle reduced to 9 days.
  • Controller: Audit fieldwork completed with no material weaknesses reported.
• VPE: Refactor engineering handbook to reflect org structure and have leaders take ownership of their sections => 100% done
• VPE: Source 150 candidates and hire a director of infra, director of support, and a prod manager: Sourced 150 (100%), Hired 3 (100%) => 100% complete on sourcing and hiring
  • Dev Backend: Source 50 candidates and hire a geo manager: Sourced 50 (100%), Hired 1 (100%)
    • Discussion: Source 150 candidates and hire 3 developers: Sourced 160 (100%), Hired 2 (66%)
    • Platform: Source 150 candidates and hire 3 developers: Sourced 160 (100%), Hired 1 (33%)
    • Distribution: Source 50 candidates and hire 1 engineer: Sourced 52 (110%), Hired 0 (0%)
  • Ops Backend: Source 50 candidates and hire 1 monitoring manager: Sourced 56 (112%), Hired 0 (0%)
    • Monitoring: Source 100 candidates and hire 2 monitoring engineers: Sourced 100 (100%), Hired 0 (0%)
    • CI/CD: Source 100 candidates and hire 2 engineers: Sourced 101 (101%), Hired 1 (50%) => 100% complete for sourcing, 50% complete for hiring
    • Security Products: Source 50 candidates and hire 1 Backend Developer: Sourced 50 (100%), Hired 0 (0%)
  • Quality: Source 100 candidates and hire 2 test automation Engineers: Sourced 128 (128%), Hired 2 (100%) => 100% done for both sourcing and hiring.
  • Frontend: Source 150 candidates and hire 3 developers: Sourced 10 - In progress (6%), Hired 3 (100%)
  • Infrastructure: Source 50 candidates and hire a database manager: Sourced 50 (100%), Hired 0 (0%)
    • Production: Source 200 candidates and hire 4 production engineers: Sourced 71 (35.5%), Hired 3 (75%)
    • Database: Source 100 candidates and hire 1 database engineers and 1 manager: Sourced 20 (20%), Hired 0 (0%)
    • Gitaly: Source 100 candidates and hire 2 Gitaly developers: Sourced 100 (100%), Hired 0 (0%)
  • UX: Source 50 candidates and hire a UX designer: Sourced 74 (148%), Hired 1 (100%)
  • Security: Source 150 candidates and hire an Anti-abuse Analyst, a SecOps Engineer, and a Compliance Analyst: Sourced 202 (135%), Hired 2 (66%)
  • Support Engineering: Source 210 candidates and hire 1 support engineering manager and 6 support engineers: Sourced X (X%), Hired X (X%)
    • Support Services: Source 90 candidates and hire 3: Sourced 20 (22%), Hired 3 (100%)
• CMO: Hire to plan and prevent burnout. DevRel team plan, corporate marketing team plan, marketing and sales development team plan.
  • MSD: Hire to plan. SDR team plan, Field Marketing team plan, Online Growth team plan

Retrospective

VPE

• GOOD
  • We rebuilt the Production team with a concerted recruiting effort
  • The Engineering Handbook refactor went smoothly
  • All sourcing goals were met
  • All hires were made
• BAD
  • Several high-profile DB incidents marred availability of GitLab.com and decreased customer confidence
  • The GCP project was delayed several times in the quarter
• TRY
  • We need to continue the better predictability that the GCP project finished the quarter with and close it out in July
  • We need to continue adding to our production and database teams and implement the new org structure
  • Directors and managers need to take ownership of their handbook sections in Q3 and build them out
  • I need to assist directors with their manager hiring in Q3, as well as their trickiest IC vacancies

Frontend

• GOOD
  • Made hiring target and onboarded successfully all new hires
  • New Teams inside the Frontend department
  • We shipped the Bootstrap 4 upgrade and the Merge Request Refactoring was finally finished
  • Our done deliverables count is constantly going up
• BAD
  • Hard time with sourcing for roles outside of Frontend
  • Bootstrap Upgrade had too many regressions
  • Too many bumpy development flows (too long until actionable, blocking dependencies, etc.) and late realisation of problems
• TRY
  • Continue Hiring and Team structure transformation
  • Getting better to estimate and especially find stepping stones early
  • Improve workflows, tooling and especially individual planning to get to 100% deliverables

Dev Backend

• GOOD
  • Two KRs at 100%: Sourcing/hiring + handbook
  • Hire was made quickly from pre-existing applicants, so sourcing was applied to future hires
  • Handbook updates spread through quarter, healthy pace for introducing + discussing change
• BAD
  • Sourced candidates haven’t been contacted - need better pipeline for sourced talent
  • Handbook KR wasn’t specific enough, had to redefine that halfway through the quarter
  • Dashboards didn’t ship - too much time waiting on external teams
• TRY
  • Keep KRs from being dependent on other teams as much as possible
  • Ensure KRs are specific and measurable
  • Both of the above are known best practices for KRs. Don’t make exceptions to known best practices for KRs. :)

Discussion

• GOOD
  • Made two new hires early in the quarter, putting us ahead of schedule for a while
  • Shipped deliverables at a consistent rate
  • Hiring pool puts us in better shape to hire well across all teams
• BAD
  • Missed hiring target; we also aren’t particularly close to making that extra hire soon
  • Missed a particular deliverable (batch commenting) several times
  • Rails 5 spilled over to Q3, but it is much closer now
• TRY
  • Using weight / throughput to keep feature delivery on track
  • Rotate team expertise more
  • Work closer with the frontend team in scheduling

Distribution

• GOOD
  • Being very disciplined in scheduling deliverables allowed us to keep our promises.
  • Managed to deliver Helm charts in beta as promised by working in weekly milestones which allowed us to change direction quicker based on current status and direction.
  • Introduction of Team Issue Triaging allowed us to keep on top of incoming issues with the omnibus-gitlab issue tracker, and reduce the number of stale issues.
  • Replaced a team member fairly quickly after a departure.
• BAD
  • Team size has reduced which impacted our ability to deliver on Technical Debt and performance improvements.
  • Hiring was impacted by a mismatch in our proposed compensation and real market expectations.
  • Noticeable team fragmentation between two major team projects.
  • No capacity to tackle non-critical projects.
• TRY
  • Reduce team fragmentation by rotating team between projects.
  • Create a stronger candidate pipeline and hit the hiring targets.

Geo

• GOOD
  • We conducted more than 8 GCP failover rehearsals and improved them each time.
  • We shipped a repository ref checksum features that gave us confidence in the GCP data for 4+ million repositories.
  • We helped improve Geo at scale by fixing numerous bugs with uploads, Wiki, and repository sync.
  • We upgraded GitLab to git 2.16, which turned out to be non-trivial.
  • We shipped HTTP push to the Geo secondary, including Git LFS support.
  • We made significant progress towards supporting SSH push to the Geo secondary.
  • We made progress towards activating hashed storage in production by finding and fixing more bugs in the implementation.
• BAD
  • We missed a number of deliverables due to merge requests in review.
  • We overestimated team capacity due to GCP migration tasks and vacations.
  • We still have database performance issues at scale.
  • We still haven’t activated hashed storage in production.
• TRY
  • Nominate another Geo maintainer
  • Reduce the variability of the deliverables scheduled from month to month
  • Activate hashed storage in dev and Ops instances today

Platform

• GOOD
  • Consistent deliverable hit rate
  • Finally shipped GraphQL endpoint, which had been an OKR at least once before!
  • Hit sourcing goal
  • Having Deliverable and Stretch issues works well; few Stretch issues get hit, but developers indicate that they feel less pressure as the feature freeze nears than before
• BAD
  • Multiple deliverables were affected by urgent work related to the GDPR
  • Multiple deliverables slipped because issue scope wasn’t well defined until late into the month, and was often larger than anticipated
  • Only hired 1 person
  • Deliverable hit rate still under 80%
• TRY
  • Being more conservative with maximum weight per person
  • Work with PMs to ensure that issue scope is defined ahead of the kickoff
  • Keep iterating on hiring process

Gitaly

• GOOD
  • Got on strategy for identifying remaining work to 1.0 (tripswitch)
  • Began working with agency for sourcing hires (Sourcery)
• BAD
  • 1.0 didn’t have a fully identified scope until beginning of Q3
  • 1.1 still hasn’t become a priority until 1.0 is delivered
  • Lots of churn around who is on the team made consistent throughput difficult
  • Extended use of feature flags made it easy to create complications (easier to turn off a feature flag than fix a bug)
  • Hard to attract the right kind of candidate (too many applicants who know Rails but only dabble in Golang)
• TRY
  • Working more closely with recruiting agency to get the right kind of hires
  • Keeping team size more stable + above a minimal threshold for forward progress
  • Being less conservative with feature flags and a little more willing to trade risk for time-to-delivery

Database

• GOOD
  • Set up of team structure for future team members.
• BAD
  • Self inflicted downtime from maintenance in June
  • Not enough people (2) to pay attention to production stability and work with Engineering teams on performance
  • Small pipeline of candidates for DB roles
• TRY
  • Implement and follow plans for change control around any DB work
  • Initial team structure for Site Availability / Site Reliability including DB
  • Pulled in sourcing agency
  • Updated posts to Ruby Weekly and hackernews

Production

• GOOD
  • Hiring - help from all involved from recruiting to exec to team was great
  • Started to get a handle on infrastructure work for GCP and burnt down work to do
• BAD
  • Team has been spread thin - only 2 people on call in EU, 4 in Americas regions is hard on productivity
  • GCP dates slipping
• TRY
  • Continued strict focus on getting GCP done with focus on Production stability, GCP, everything else
  • Getting new people in Q3 up to speed and on call in fast, but reasonable time
  • Focus on hiring in EU regions
  • Team structure changes mentioned in database

Ops Backend

• GOOD
  • Great collaboration with Dev Backend to implement a new hiring process to pool candidates for backend dev roles.
  • Managers across backend teams working and supporting each other through the changes in hiring process.
• BAD
  • Got through the entire hiring process with a great manager candidate and was not able to close them at the offer stage due to a mismatch in compensation expectation.
• TRY
  • Make sure compensation expectation are clear with all candidates during the screening call.
  • Continue to iterate and enhance our pool hiring process.
  • Build a strong pipeline of candidates so that we are choosing the best from multiple good candidates and have a fallback if we loose our first choice

CI/CD

• GOOD
  • Completed coverage of Auto DevOps with GitLab QA
  • A lot of candidates were sourced
• BAD
  • 75% deliverable completion rate falls quite short of the 100% goal
  • Issues mentioned at kickoff were some of those that didn’t get merged
  • Configuration Team splitting off reduced capacity
  • Only new developer hire occurred at very end of quarter
  • Team experienced a lot of transition with new manager and change in PM
• TRY
  • Using weight or throughput to assess delivery impact and team capacity
  • Have new manager focus on hiring for the team especially at the start of the quarter

Monitoring

• GOOD
  • Great backend work by temporary team member.
  • Delivered features despite being short staffed.
• BAD
  • Short staffed due losing a team member for 1/3 of the quarter.
• TRY
  • Continue to source and hire more onto the team.
  • Size workload better to account for being short staffed.

Security Products

• GOOD
  • Onboarding is done, the team is working at full speed now.
  • We can ship features with backend in GitLab.
  • Gemnasium migration is done, the team can focus on GitLab issues.
  • We have a release process for Security Products docker images.
• BAD
  • The team should be growing to handle all the domain of Security Products. Even if we sourced 50 people, we didn’t manage to hire anyone in this quarter.
  • Some planning issues, due to our lack of knowledge of some processes.
  • The product vision was not aligned with our OKRs, so we had to update them during the quarter to remove some expectations about Gemnasium integration into Omnibus.
  • Not enough time/resources to maintain legacy code and wrappers.
• TRY
  • Improve planning with a Gantt chart.
  • Commit to 100% deliverables shipped to production.
  • Better integration with GitLab QA.
  • Release Manager rotation to handle bugs, tools update, support, etc.

Security

• GOOD
  • We continue to mitigate new security vulnerabilities at a timeframe that is at or better than industry standard.
  • Our response time to GitLab.com abuse cases has significantly improved through detection automation efforts.
  • Our hiring rate is has been fairly healthy, and sourcing efforts have been successful.
• BAD
  • Logging capabilities are still lacking, such that incident response impact analysis is onerous.
  • Lack of consistent severity and priority labeling on backlogged security issues poses challenge in prioritization.
  • Security roles are difficult to hire for, due to high demand for skilled candidates. Our security compensation benchmark needs to be more competitive to attract top talent.
• TRY
  • Continue to refine and improve upon critical and non-critical security release processes. This will involve continuing to train new RMs to become familiar with the process.
  • Increase security hiring pipelines and close out more hires than past quarters, in order to scale Security Team with company growth and initiatives.

Support

• GOOD
  • Focus on SLA achievement with training, process and tool enhancements helped global team reach 88% overall.
  • Functionality to track and report on Customer Satisfaction restored.
  • Very good achievement to hiring plan.
• BAD
  • Still too many SLA breaches while we grow the team.
  • Closing Support Engineering manager positions needs to happen faster.
• TRY
  • Source-a-thon for key positions, with less focus on Support Agents and directed regional focus on Support Engineers.
  • Determine ways to streamline technical onboarding.

Support Engineering

• GOOD
  • More Support Engineers are exposed to High Availability Configurations
  • Ticket Growth for Self-managed customers is growing slower than revenue.
• BAD
  • We need to grow AMER West & APAC to achieve SLA targets
  • Learning GEO is difficult & upgrading GEO needs clearer documentation.
• TRY
  • Targeted APAC recruiting
  • Designing a GEO Bootcamp curriculum
  • Finalize Premium ticket Priority to offer better customer experience.

Services Support

• GOOD
  • With better staffing we’ve been able to consistently increase our SLA performance and work through a sizeable backlog.
  • Services Agents have done an great job collaborating on process and documentation.
• BAD
  • This quarters hires are starting later in the quarter than we would have liked.
  • We haven’t been able to close any EMEA hires.
• TRY
  • Get a first iteration on our Statement of Support finalized.
  • Focus on EMEA hiring in source-a-thons and recruiting.
  • Transition GitLab.com free users out of ZenDesk.

Quality

• GOOD
  • Unblocking ourselves after Looker ETL delays for building quality metrics dashboard. We completed the prototype and it is running at: https://quality-dashboard.gitlap.com
  • Everyone in the team has clear ownership and priorities.
  • We made good progress with hiring and sourcing.
• BAD
  • We discovered a lot of un-triaged CE & EE bugs as part of the dashboard prototype implementation.
  • ETL for GitLab.com Looker was delayed. We were blocked for multiple weeks.
  • Lack of test coverage in gitlab-qa and in the release process.
  • The team is stretched thin, especially with issue and merge request triage. Quality team rotation hasn’t been enough help, a lot of this still falls on Mark F.
• TRY
  • We need to plan very early to get help from other teams on cross-functional initiatives (esp with CE/EE code reorg). Issues should be prepped and communicate at least one milestone ahead and communicate again before the start of the milestone.
  • Implement issue triage assignments for the rest of engineering and not just for the quality team.
  • For important deliverables and initiatives, we should lean on tools that are more in our sphere of control.
  • Bring up more gitlab-qa test automation coverage.

UX

• GOOD
  • Research and design work done for Auto DevOps in Q1 set us up for success in delivering UX Ready solutions.
  • Increased engagement and collaboration between PM and UXers.
  • Sourcing and hiring went smoothly with many good candidates.
• BAD
  • Hiring and increasing workloads slowed down progress on the design system.
  • Scheduling became time-consuming as we iterated on the process and PM/UXer/FE handoff.
• TRY
  • Continue to iterate on scheduling and planning process.
  • Focus work in design system on areas that support GitLab vision and increase usability.

Pipe-to-Spend

• GOOD
  • 148% of opportunity value creation target achieved.
  • 185% of SMB / Self Serve IACV plan achieved.
  • Improved visibility of inbound demand with the introduction of Bizible, and campaign performance with the new campaign dashboard.
  • Content team hit 100% of their KRs and content (especially video content) has improved.
• BAD
  • 82% of revised Q2 Field Marketing SCLAU forecast.
  • Hiring plan not met by 1 person each in field marketing and online growth.
  • Over committing and under delivering on field events. Communication, collaboration, and organization are not consistently good.
  • Hard to work with other teams that do not work asynchronously. Too many meetings being held with no outcome.
• TRY
  • Standardize and document process for evaluating whether or not we should sponsor an event with clear expectations in terms of SCLAU and ROI.
  • Respectfully push back when last minute requests are made that won’t move the needle.
  • Share customer feedback and pain points with product management on the CustomersDot to ensure it supports a more self-serve experience involving upgrades, true-ups and renewals.
  • Put more time into cross functional coordination and kickoffs to ensure PMM, GM, Sales et al are working tightly together. Hold each other accountable to GitLab’s async workflow and MVCs.