GitLab Co-Create Initiative

Goal

The Co-Create Program is designed to provide our customers with the necessary support and resources to drive innovation together. This could involve developing new features, enhancing existing ones, or fixing bugs.

Offer

To ensure effective use of this collaborative period, GitLab will co-locate 1 engineer for 1 week to kick off the co-development efforts. Before the onsite engagement, Developer Relations will conduct an interactive workshop to identify collaboration opportunities, ensure their engineers are adequately enabled to contribute to GitLab, and ensure all required legal requirements are met between our customer, and GitLab.

Customer Benefits

Develop a deeper understanding of GitLab’s platform beyond its use, understanding how to develop new features, product enhancements, or custom integrations on GitLab.
Deeper relationship with GitLab product engineers and insights into GitLab’s codebase and GitLab’s own development and contributions processes.
Dedicated support for contributions made by their organizations through the Contributor Success team.

GitLab Benefits

Increased trust and ownership from participating customers
Improved customer empathy for the participating engineer.
Continuous contributions to fuel our dual fly-wheel approach

Getting Started

GitLab has a list of smaller issues ready to work on. Identifying and resolving a common problem together while learning the process is the quickest way to get started. Identify areas that are of high priority to the customer together with the Solutions Architect & Contributor Success. Alignment with Product & Engineering is a required prerequisite.

Identify the opportunity and create a Slack channel with the following pattern #cocreate-initiative-CUSTOMERNAME.
Determine the level of willingness and ability of the customer to contribute to GitLab.
Invite the CSM, SA, AE, Nick Veenhof & Raimund Hook.
Share your understanding of what we could work on with the customer. Contributor Success will qualify that the opportunity meets the requirements of the co-create program.
Contributor Success will lead the triage process and partner with the appropriate PMs. We will invite the PMs and other stakeholders of the problem-space to get their buy-in. This will result in 3 pathways:
1. The opportunity is not aligned with our roadmap or product strategy.
2. The opportunity is considered a ‘minor’ contribution and can entirely be handled by contributor success like any other community contribution.
3. The co-create opportunity is considered a major/relevant contribution, aligned with our roadmap and product strategy.
CSM and Contributor Success present the co-create program and identified pathway & align with the customer. Don’t make any commitments to the customer until engineering & contributor success has aligned and allocated.
Involve Contributor Success (Raimund Hook) to schedule an onboarding session with the customer’s engineers.
Only in case of a major/relevant contribution: as outlined above, we will proceed with going on-site. Invite Shekhar Patnaik into the channel & collaborate with engineering to find the right engineer we can send on-site to co-create together.
Only in case of a major/relevant contribution: Have the on-site with the GitLab engineer & the customer’s engineer(s) to work on the identified problem together.

Roles & Responsibilities

Opportunity Identification: Solution Architects (SAs) and Customer Success Managers (CSMs) will collaborate with their technical counterparts within the customer’s organization to introduce the program and identify opportunities for collaboration. They will also work with internal stakeholders such as Product managers.
Enablement: Upon identifying a viable opportunity and the right stakeholders, Developer Relations will conduct an interactive workshop to identify specific co-create opportunities and enable technically the customer’s engineers to contribute to GitLab.
Collaborative Development: GitLab’s engineering team will take the lead in pairing engineers with the customer’s team to support the development effort.

Nominate an Issue for Co-Create

Is there an issue that should be considered for the curated Co-Create issue list? Reach out to the appropriate PM and ask for their approval to add the ~co-create label to the issue. You can refer the PM to the assessment criteria below to help with their evaluation.

Assessing Issue Compatibility with Co-Create

Purpose

The Co-Create program aims to create long-term contributors by enabling customers to work directly on GitLab. Both simple and complex issues are welcome - simple issues provide great learning opportunities, while complex issues can be broken down into smaller chunks for sustained contribution.

Assessment Criteria

Product Alignment

Aligns with GitLab’s product vision and roadmap
Benefits the broader GitLab community
Has Product Manager awareness and approval

Red Flags

Conflicts with planned GitLab features or architectural decisions
Changes to core security or performance-critical systems (requires extra caution and assessment)

Decision Framework

Primary Question: Will working on this issue help the customer become a long-term GitLab contributor?

Secondary Questions:

Does this align with our product direction?
Is there a GitLab engineer available with domain expertise?

Resources

Contribute to GitLab - this webpage provides a high-level overview of the benefits related to contributing to GitLab’s open-source community, as well as contribution guidelines and tutorials aimed at helping you better understand and visualize the process.
Our stewardship of open source - this webpage discusses GitLab’s open-core business model and promises related to open-source stewardship.
Navigating Project License Requirements - A Compatibility Guide for Corporate Contributors.
GitLab’s Corporate Contributor Agreement - this Agreement covers all contributions made on behalf of a corporate contributor by the corporation’s authorized contributors. Please email cla_managers@gitlab.com to start the process of signing this agreement.

Internal Slack Channel

#cocreate-initiative

DRI

Nick Veenhof

Other stakeholders & people who were involved during the creation phase

Alex Cohen
Emilio Salvador
Sabrina Farmer
Sid Sijbrandij
David Tuan
Ashley Kramer

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