A presentation at Remote Work Roundtable in in Munich, Germany by David Planella
The recipe to operating a team of 500+ in 50+ locations, and no office
Whoami. What I do at GitLab David Planella Director of Community Relations Reports to Chief Marketing Officer Lives in Cologne, Germany ● ● ● ● Community = People = Contributors = Evangelists = Users = Enthusiasts and more Worked remotely for nearly 10 years, previously at Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Moved countries in between, did not change jobs Would not go back to a daily job at the office 2
GitLab is a single application for the entire software development lifecycle. From project planning and source code management to CI/CD, monitoring, and security.
Meet the GitLab team 👋 everyone can contribute 6
Ingredient #1 - The GitLab values helping out and being excellent to each other doing what we promise to each other and to customers working on the right things, not doing more than needed fostering an environment where everyone can thrive doing the smallest thing possible, as quickly as possible open all the things! 7
Ingredient #2 - Drink your own $BEVERAGE ● GitLab is used to manage and develop both the product and the organization ● It’s easy when collaboration, discussions and project planning are an integral part of the product ● ● 500 team members and 1,000s of contributors provide A LOT of feedback ● They also develop a unique insight to the product and their features 8
Ingredient #3 - Transparent by default ● Transparency creates awareness. It also enables us to collaborate with people outside the company and gives us more and faster feedback ● Embracing the Open Source spirit. We create value by sharing great software, documentation, examples, lessons and processes ● Everything at GitLab is public by default. Notable examples include salary expectations, post-mortems, daily company calls and more ● At all levels of the organization. From the website code, to the product repository and its issue tracker. Also those from Marketing, Infrastructure, PeopleOps and all other departments ● Fostering contribution. Public code, issues, roadmap, handbook reduce the threshold from read-only to read-write 9
Spotlight: the company handbook ● How the sausage is made. The GitLab team handbook is the central repository for how we run the company, with over 2,000 pages of text if printed. ● Feedback welcome. As part of being transparent, the handbook is open to the world ● Document all the things. Every department has their own public handbook section describing their vision, processes, workflows, policies and more ● Open at the core. GitLab’s mission, strategy, core values and OKRs are also public and kept up-to-date in the handbook ● Sharing our processes. Has been forked by startups for their own use, or taken as a model 10
Ingredient #4 - Everyone can contribute Wider community contributions* From a diverse community of volunteers, customers, resellers, partners Actively facilitating contributions for: When everyone can contribute, GitLab is designed to to propose changes without friction and ● ● GitLab the product GitLab the organization 11
Ingredient #5 - The human touch In a remote company it becomes even more important to have a space and a time to bond with team members ● ● ● Daily team call to talk what we did outside work Daily group conversation where a department shares progress and challenges Coffee chats to get to know each other ● ● ● ● Visiting grant to meet and work with colleagues Monthly AMA sessions with the CEO and E-group Topic-based Slack channels, not work related IRL GitLab Summit every 9 months 12
Questions? Feel free to reach out! 13
The recipe to operating a team of 500+ in 50+ locations, and no office
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