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Published · transcript-backed

Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

14 Apr 2024 Lenny's Podcast The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)

“Because I think oftentimes at companies at PM, checking in often feels like, "God damn, leave me alone, I just want to work on this thing.”

— Lenny Rachitsky

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
14 Apr 2024
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…And so that all ties together as that first thing. The second thing I tell everyone is don't wait. If you're concerned or learning something is going off the rails or you just want to know something's on track, don't wait until your next check-in point. A lot of the teams here do a once a week stand up, just ask a question on that issue or on the merge request or send a Slack message right away. The last thing you want to do is have a 24 hour, 48, 72 hour cycle go by and a developer or your engineering manager is stuck or they've asked you a question and now you're leaving them hanging and not getting the answer they need. And that's where, to your point, used to block up to a cubicle, taps one on the shoulder and be like, "Hey, what's going on?" And now it's got to do that digitally and that is reach out on the communication platform. We use Slack. It's like reach out on Slack or comment on the GitLab issue or merge request. For this to work, the values again come up, where you assume good intent, you be kind people. Because I think oftentimes at companies at PM, checking in often feels like, "God damn, leave me alone, I just want to work on this thing. You just don't trust that I know what I'm doing." But I think with these values that helps avoid that, I imagine? It does. And I think it also feeds back into those remote work items as well that it's actually good for you to over-communicate. It's actually good for you to focus on, is the outcome happening? You may end up in a situation where the outcome felt like it was really big, but three days into your one-month-long iteration, which we have here, all of a sudden you realize this can be knocked down a week, right? Well, now don't just wait, reach back out and say like, "Hey, this is done. What's the next thing?"…

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