Keeping Yourself Informed

Communications within Product and Solution Marketing

As a distributed organization, GitLab and our Product and Solution Marketing department and teams use asynchronous, transparent, frequent, and multimodal communication to keep ourselves informed.

Our most important communication channels are issues, boards, and GitLab itself, followed by this handbook, Slack, Zoom, and other tools. See the general GitLab Communication page and Tools and Tips for more information.

Below are the parts of GitLab and Slack that are used most in Product and Solution Marketing.

GitLab trackers, boards, handbook, etc.

Copy in from /product-marketing.

Slack channels

GitLab has more Slack channels than users—at last count, 1,492 public channels for 1,069 weekly active users.

These lists will make it a little easier to get started. They are arranged as general to GitLab, specific to Product and Solution Marketing, then a few more recommendations and some just for fun, before sharing a few Slack pro-tips.

Reminder: Slack data are only retained for 90 days. If you share, discover, or decide something important there, ensure it has a permanent place in our handbook, product docs, etc. and read the general handbook section for Slack guidelines.

GitLab

Read all of

• #whats-happening-at-gitlab: usually redundant with company calls but keep up with
• #company-fyi: company-wide announcements channel

Highly recommended

• #is-this-known: bugs, canary failures
• #questions: business and technical questions
• #thanks: if they’re awesome and you know it, chat your thanks

Product and Solution Marketing

You’re up to date if you catch up in GitLab, make meetings or see notes, and depending on your team, catch up with:

• #analyst-relations
• #competition
• #marketing
• #pmms
• #pmmteam
• #product-marketing
• #release-post: when shadowing or leading a post
• #tech-pmm

Also recommended

• #cloud-aws, #cloud-gcp, #backend, #ceo, #cfp, #content-updates, #development for broken master, environment issues, #frontend, #fundraising, #handbook, #external-comms for collaboration with our PR agency, #incident-management, #product, #production, #quality, #talent-acquisition, #sales, #security, #support_escalations, #UX
• Help yourself! find many more popular and active channels at /stats#channels

Have some fun

• #dad_jokes, #office-today, #random
• local channels: for your area or one you’re visiting, hit command-K or ‘Jump to…’ in the upper left of the UI and search for ’loc_’. From #loc_nyc to #loc_pnw, and from loc_india to loc_berlin there are at least 75 local channels.

Slack hacks

Don’t miss the critical handbook section with Slack guidelines. We also recommend:

• use stars: on the upper left of the UI, star the channels and direct message threads you use most
• monitor keywords: go to Slack > preferences and go to ‘Notifications’. Scroll down to ‘My keywords’ and add as many as you like, comma-separated. Keywords some of use include ‘PMM’ and ‘product marketing’.
• tailor notifications: go to Slack > preferences and go to ‘Notifications’. Tweak to your heart’s content. To set channel-specific notifications, go to the channel and click the channel name in the conversation header. Next, click the notifications drop-down menu and choose your notification preference.
• #slack-power-users: of course! a channel for our friendly neighborhood power users. Join at your own risk.