Co-Create & Community Engineering Team

Common Links

Sub-pages

Strategy

This team directly follows the strategy outlined in our open source growth strategy.

Mission

Co-Create at the speed of imagination. We lead the contributor program, support and attract customers who co-create GitLab with us, and increase the efficiency of our contribution process through technical and process improvements. This is aligned with GitLab’s mission to unlock every team to ship trusted software at the speed of imagination and with the 3-year internal company strategy.

North Star

Our North Star is a five-year destination. It does not change quarter to quarter. Each quarter’s key result is a step toward it.

• Grow monthly community contributions to 6,000 within five years. A contribution is a shipped artifact another GitLab user can use, reuse, learn from, or copy: code, agents, flows, skills, and CI/CD components.
• Improve SHIP Time roughly 10x within five years. SHIP Time (Scope Handoff to Impact Published) is the time from an assigned idea entering delivery to a reusable artifact shipping. SHIP Time supersedes Open Community MR Age (OCMA).

Both are 10x-scale ambitions. No single quarter reaches them.

FY27 Direction

FY27 takes the first measurable steps toward the North Star, through two key results. They map to the two halves of the team.

Co-Create: with customers to grow accounts

Turn building together with customers into durable account expansion.

• Metric: expansion pipeline influenced by Co-Create.

Community Engineering: with the community to accelerate the roadmap

Grow reusable product value delivered by the community, and deliver it faster.

• Metric: monthly community contributions, targeting 1,100 per month, and SHIP Time.

Team Responsibilities

These are high-level. Each serves the two key results above.

• Lead the contributor program and grow community contributions toward the North Star.
• Support and attract customers who co-create GitLab with us.
• Increase the efficiency of the contribution process through technical and process improvements, and reduce SHIP Time.
• Coach, review, and unblock community contributions as a point of escalation to GitLab DRIs.
• Recognize impactful contributors and contributions.
• Build and run the contributor platform and the tooling that drives contributions forward.
• Collaborate with our Marketing counterparts, the Core team, and Product and Engineering.

Operational detail for these responsibilities lives in the contributor workflows sub-page.

Co-Create program

The GitLab Co-Create program is a cross-functional initiative led by the Co-Create & Community Engineering team, in combination with Product and Engineering. More GitLab specific instructions can be found in our cocreate handbook page.

Team Members

Name	Role
Arianna Haradon	Senior Fullstack Engineer, Co-Create & Community Engineering
Dennis Meister	Fullstack Engineer, Co-Create & Community Engineering
Isa Huerga Ayza	Manager, Developer Relations Programs
Lee Tickett	Principal Fullstack Engineer, Co-Create & Community Engineering Core Team member
Mattias Michaux	Fullstack Engineer, Co-Create & Community Engineering
Missy Davies	Fullstack Engineer, Co-Create & Community Engineering
Nick Veenhof	Director, Co-Create & Community Engineering
Raimund Hook	Staff Fullstack Engineer, Co-Create & Community Engineering
Sina Abadi	Fullstack Engineer, Co-Create & Community Engineering

Contributor platform

Our contributor platform is the central hub for open source contributors to GitLab and community activity. It consumes contribution data from multiple platforms and is fully documented in the contributors-gitlab-com project README.

@leetickett-gitlab is the technical and engineering DRI.

Project Management

• Our team project is our single source of truth for all tasks & backlog.
• Epics that contain cross-functional work across multiple departments can be created at the gitlab-org level.

File an issue

gitlab-org/gitlab

All issues that relate to the Open Source project GitLab and that can serve to enhance the contributor flow and are public by nature should be created here by default. We aim to not have any distinction between contributors or GitLab team-members for which we expect by default that everyone should be able to contribute to.

• Location: gitlab-org/gitlab
• Required label: Contributor Success

gitlab-org/developer-relations/contributor-success/team-task

All issues that relate to the inner working of the company GitLab, including specific internal team workings, onboardings-issues or issues relating to customers that should be separated from the Open Source project GitLab can be placed here.

• Location: gitlab-org/developer-relations/contributor-success/team-task
• Required label: Contributor Success

OKRs

OKRs are not public. But rest assured, we have these goals always in mind, including in our quarterly objectives & key results. The way we structure objectives, key results, and the supporting work that ships them is documented in how we report progress.

Performance Indicators

We have the following Performance Indicators

Unique Wider Community Contributors per Month

Unique Wider Community Contributors per Month

• Activities:
  • Partnership with Developer Relations team.
  • Hold community office hours.
  • Hold hackathons.
  • Allow running of QA tests from forks.
  • Shorten the CI runtime for community contributions (in forks).

More details can be found in the Unique Wider Community Contributors per Month Marketing PI section

Community contributions and SHIP Time

We track community contributions per month and SHIP Time (Scope Handoff to Impact Published). Together they measure both the volume and the speed of community-delivered value.

• Activities:
  • Shorten CI time for community contributions
  • Improve community contribution automation
  • Enable running QA tests on forks
  • Increase the number of coaches
  • Partner with Engineering Productivity to improve contribution tooling

NOTE: SHIP Time supersedes Open Community MR Age (OCMA). OCMA is retained in the Developer Relations performance indicators for historical continuity while the SHIP Time baseline is established.

How we plan work

Our issue workflow, workflow and priority labels, how we pick issues, our quarterly retrospective, and the team stand-up are documented in the contributor workflows sub-page.

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