David DeSanto: prediction

Transcript context

…So the four pieces of advice you shared, transparency, spend a lot of time just being more transparent, focus on outcomes versus quality, quantity of hours. Over communicate and make time for in-person. Within the outcomes bucket, a lot of people like, yes, it sounds great, we will focus on outcomes. We're not going to think about how many hours you're working. It's hard to do a lot of times because in this sort of work it's like I don't know, what should I expect of this person to achieve? Maybe this bug takes a week, maybe took a day. Do you have any just advice to help figure out and nail, here's how we can create outcomes that connect well with people actually working fully? Fixing a bug is more of a deliverable than a business outcome. And so we try to make them things like, we want to have 60% of our customer base using this part of the portfolio. Now what do we do to get there? And that allows people then have a measurable outcome that does tie back to how many hours they're working to a degree, right? Because scoping it. But it's not about the ship 20 features next month. That could take you more than a month. That could take you a day and a half if you break down your feature into tiny little features. Whereas it's more like celebrate the adoption, not the shipping. And I think that's really where we've tried to move. GitLab as a company has always been very focused on how fast we ship software, but that's not really how our customers use it. It's more about what pain point or use case did we solve? And if you're now framing it in that way, you begin to move away from the deliverable and the hours and you get into the, did the customer adopt it? What was their outcome? What success did they have? What are you trying to do with that? And by the way, I think that's the biggest challenge for people who move from a different role into a product division or a product role, is changing that dynamic to not be the bits and the bytes but be the use case, the pain point. Because sometimes you actually don't need to ship a new feature per se, sometimes you just have to make it more usable and then all of a sudden you're getting the outcome you're looking for. You said that a lot of people reach out to you and try to dig into some of the things you do. What are some of those most common questions people ask you and or where do people most often go wrong when they're trying to work the way you all work?…

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