Foundations Stage

The Foundations stage deals with cross functional work from the design system, to importers, to the navigation.

About

The responsibilities of this stage are described by the Foundations product category. Foundations is made up of multiple groups, each with their own features and areas of responsibility, noted last on this page.

I have a question. Who do I ask?

In GitLab issues, questions should start by @ mentioning the relevant Product Manager for the product category.

GitLab team members can also use #s_foundations.

How we work

In accordance with our GitLab values.
Transparently: nearly everything is public, we record/livestream meetings whenever possible.
We get a chance to work on the things we want to work on.
Everyone can contribute; no silos.
- The goal is to have product give engineering and design the opportunity to be involved with direction and issue definition from the very beginning.

OKRs

For a list of active OKRs, check the OKR project.

Direction

The direction and strategy for Foundations is documented on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/foundations/. This page (and the category direction pages under the “Categories” header) is the single source of truth on where we’re going and why.

Direction pages should be reviewed regularly by Product. When updating these pages, please CC the relevant group to keep your teammates informed.
Product should make sure that their groups understand the direction and have an opportunity to contribute to it. Consider a monthly direction AMA for your group to field questions.

Career Development

Giving / receiving feedback

It can be hard to understand how you’re doing in your role, because feedback can come off as formal (annual reviews, 360 surveys, career development conversations, goal check-ins) or casual (in Slack channels, 1-1’s, MR reviews, team meetings.) We receive various kinds of feedback regularly and through different formats, so the type of feedback you’re receiving is not always clear. In order to be more intentional about the types of feedback given, here is a classification chart based on three types of feedback:

Label	Meaning	Example
(appreciation)	I want to thank you for doing this, and please do more of it in the future	“I did not expect that you would have created a working group, because you’ve done so, our whole team will benefit from the results.”
(coaching)	I’m trying to help you improve a behavior you are already exhibiting or change a behavior that you currently have	“The reports that you give me are very helpful, and in the future we can schedule them for the first of the month to be more consistent.”
(evaluation)	Tells you where you stand according to existing standards or expectations	“My expectation was that our decision would be transparent. Since it was not, our team has forgotten the decision, so we must be sure and meet that expectation next time.”

Engineering Managers

This section lists relevant experience areas for individual contributors interested in the management track, new engineering managers, or existing engineering managers who may be lacking opportunities. This list can be used to identify opportunities in these areas.

Expert hiring manager

Expert hiring manager

Experience with behavioral interviews
Screening candidates for your team
Identifying cultural answers or clarifying vague answers
Identifying a headcount need in advance

Performance management

Performance management

Crucial conversations
Performance improvement plans
Coaching on improvement areas
Giving feedback
Identifying underperformance

Communicating company decisions

Communicating company decisions

Annual review, calibration sessions, compensation discussions
Motivating team members on opportunities that come with negatives (borrow requests, engineering allocations, feature change locks)

Product area

Product area

Triage reports
Define and monitor productivity metrics, take action if necessary
Collaborative planning
Proactively identifying issues or recommending engineering allocations
Leading an incident in your area
Proposing and driving a borrow request (reactive)
Shared OKRs and delivery

Team success

Team success

Career growth development leading to promotions, mentors, technical interviews, maintainers
Setting goals based on 360 feedback and career aspirations
Smooth onboarding process
Frequent and transparent handbook updates
Identifying performance indicators for the team
Becoming a mentor

Achieving consensus

Achieving consensus

Facilitating a working group
Participating in stage, sub-department, skip level, and/or engineering manager discussions
Coordinating the dev on-call
Experience with being Incident Manager On-Call (IMOC)
Collaboration with the full product group quad planning

Personal growth

Personal growth

Receiving feedback
Continued learning, identifying new growth opportunities, and building a personal growth plan
Seeking a mentor

Trainings offered by GitLab for EMs

Other resources

Slack #aspiring-managers channel
Handbook page dedicated to growing leadership skills for ICs

Staff Engineers

For an explanation on what to expect as a Staff engineer and a list of ideas for tactical initaitives, visit this page.

Team Days

Engineering management schedules Team Days every 2 quarters as a way to celebrate our wins as a team, with our counterparts, and look forward to the future. These are optional social events led primarily by the attendees in terms of activities and discussions, but scheduled and organized by engineering managers.

Sync meetings will occur in all time zones, and activities may happen throughout the day in a dedicated team day Slack channel. While optional, all team members should have an opportunity to participate for as long as they want, so capacity for all engineers should be accounted for during milestone planning.

Holiday Gift Exchange (2023)

We will kick off the holiday season on December 8 by optionally participating in a Secret Santa exchange - an exchange where a group of colleagues will exchange holiday presents anonymously with each member of the group being assigned to another member to provide a small gift.

The exchange amount will be $30 USD, including shipping and tax fees. This amount cannot be expensed and would need to be paid for out of pocket. Team members are not required to participate.
A form has been provided to sign up. This form will include ideal gift ideas for yourself, as well as your formatted mailing address, and local / online stores to choose your gift from.
The form will close on December 13. At this time, your Secret Santa will be randomly selected and you will be given the name of a team member to buy a gift for, their ideal gift idea and local buying options if available.
Your address will not be shared with anyone other than the person sending your gift, and the organizer (@wortschi).

Say/Do Ratio

When we commit to a new milestone, engineering managers apply the ~Deliverable label to all issues they are able to commit to based on capacity. This serves as a promise from engineering to product as well as a signal for the most important issues in the milestone for the team to pick up. At the end of the milestone, successfully completed issues with the ~Deliverable label are assessed against the total number of ~Deliverable issues in order to create the Say/Do Ratio (7 issues completed of 10 committed to is a 70% Say/Do result.)

The Say/Do Ratio is a metric used to:

Provide predictability and stability when milestone planning
Raise flags about the types of issues that are frequently disruptive
Measure how well we are meeting our commitments to our customers

Meetings

Although we have a bias for asynchronous communication, synchronous meetings are necessary and should adhere to our communication guidelines. Some regular meetings that take place in Manage are:

Frequency	Meeting	DRI	Possible topics
Every other Thursday	Engineering managers discussion	@m_gill	Ideas, help or resources needed from others, concerns, questions, etc.

For one-off, topic specific meetings, please always consider recording these calls and sharing them (or taking notes in an internally available document.

Agenda documents and recordings can be placed in the shared Google drive (internal only) as a single source of truth.

All meetings should have an agenda prepared at least 12 hours in advance. If this is not the case, you are not obligated to attend the meeting. Consider meetings canceled if they do not have an agenda by the start time of the meeting.

Shared calendars

Foundations: Important Dates - Use this calendar for stage-wide reminders (OKR due dates, promotion cycles, talent assessment timelines, regular holiday preparations)
- To add this calendar to your Google Calendar, use this calendar ID c_kvfbp2t8edtgm4rjialus0834g@group.calendar.google.com
Foundations Shared - Use this calendar for recurring group level reminders and meetings (Release kickoff, milestone planning, social calls)
- To add the shared calendar to your Google Calendar, please use this link (GitLab internal).
- To add a meeting to the shared calendar, please add the link in this document to the event.

To add a new member to the shared calendar
- Click “Settings and Sharing” in the kebab menu when mousing over “Foundations Shared” in your Google Calendar sidebar under “My calendars”.
- Scroll to the “Share with specific people” section of the settings area. Click “Add people” and add the new member with “Make changes and manage sharing”.
For a more detailed walkthrough, have a look at a quick video walkthrough

Metrics

Links and resources

Stage links
- Discussions and issues are located at gitlab-org/manage
- General Slack #s_foundations

Engineering links
- Manage and Data Science engineering discussion are located at gitlab-org/manage/engineering-managers
- Social channel #pikachus-social
- Engineering Manager Slack #s_manage_data_science_ems

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