Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I think there's really two things. So the first one is our issue tracker for everything we're doing. The majority of those issues are public. It's also available for people who have an account to also create and comment on. And so whenever we do a call with a customer or I present at a conference or my team presents, we always say, "Hey, please go look at our issue tracker and if there's something you like, vote it up. If there's something you want to see change, leave a comment." And I think that's unique to GitLab. I think we've actually caused other organizations to do something similar because of that. And the other one is our direction and our strategy. You mentioned earlier, sometimes it's just a high level paragraph, but sometimes if you go deeper, we have a one-year direction that is very detailed and links over to our issue tracker to help you see, "Hey, we're going to do, I don't know, we're going to build widget X and we're going to do it in the next six months and here's how we're going to do it." And I think all those things together have really allowed GitLab to be the most transparent publicly traded company in the world. And we're very proud of that because it's just in our DNA to do it. I think what's really interesting about this is it's the epitome of, it's not the idea, it's the execution. You guys share so many of the things that most people keep secret and it's worked. I guess is there any lessons there of just like, it's actually a lot, the execution is what's separates you from everyone else. Someone could just basically copy everything you're doing in theory, build something like you built, but they haven't. Yeah, I think you're touching on actually when I interviewed in 2019, I actually asked Sid, our co-founder and CEO, a similar question. And I came from security in the GitLab and I said, hey, we don't share more than four or six weeks with a roadmap with customers and even sales because we were in the situation where we didn't want our great idea to be taken and built before we built it. And that had happened to me at other places I've worked. And so in that conversation with him, he basically said, "It's product's job to be ambitious instead engineering's job to meet that ambition." And if you think of it that way, and it's that collaboration between the two, it becomes less scary to put the information out. But you are right. We're very even transparent there. The thing that gets into what you mentioned, the ability to ship software, I'm floored by these numbers, but these are real numbers for us. We still ship 12 releases a year. It used to be on the 22nd of every month, it's now the third Thursday, so we don't have to have people work over a weekend, but we've done that for over a decade. And our last release put us at 149 releases that have come out essentially every month for the last little over 12 years.…

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