GitLab Beyond Code, 25 May 2021

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From YouTube: Beyond Code: Session 1

Description

Beyond Code: started as an idea within the Women TMRG group at GitLab. It is an inclusive event series for the wider community highlighting women who work at GitLab across various functions.

Each speaker will talk about ways that they manage their day-to-day responsibilities -- using GitLab beyond code.

Session 1 topics include:

How GitLab changed how we work! - Leslie Blanchard, Field Marketing
Product Handbook - Melissa Ushakov, Product
Pre-Sales & Game Management - Taylor Medlin, Sales
Driving Design Decisions - Holly Reynolds, Design

A

I guess I got a little excited to kick off the event, but again I am jamie rochelle. I am the evangelism program manager and I support some of the wider community programs, such as the meetup and heroes program, and I will give a little bit more detail about how you can participate later on in the presentation, and my favorite movie is the gladiator.

A

How about you nerdsy.

B

Yeah um so, first of all I'll just introduce myself, I'm nurizi sanchez and I'm the senior open source program manager at get lab. I run the git lab for open source program, which I'll talk a little bit more about at the very end of this session and to answer your question jamie, uh my favorite movie is not really a movie but a series.

B

The harry potter series, because I love things with magic and all that kind of stuff fantasy adventure yeah.

B

So we thought that we would start off by kind of framing why this event exists and we recognize that not everybody might know what gitlab is or they might only know part of what it's used for and when people think about git lab they oftentimes associate it with being a tool for engineering teams and we're here today to show you that it is a platform for the whole team because delivering great software great products involves more than just the engineering team.

B

It's everybody from the very beginning of planning and managing creating the product for the the specs, designing everything to deploying and managing it afterwards and we've identified many different stages. Sorry, and can you go back to the other one yeah uh things like manage, plan create verify package, secure, release, configure and defend, and all of these stages typically have their own set of tools. So teams end up managing many different tools for their software delivery process.

B

Git lab is a single tool for all of these stages and we hope that everybody can um can use it. That's what we'll be going over today at gitlab. Our mission is to change all creative work from read only to read, write so that everyone can contribute, because we believe that when everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors and greatly increase the rate of human progress.

B

So now, with that in mind, that git lab is a platform for everybody and that we, our mission, is for everybody to contribute. That's where this event series really began. It started off as an idea within the women's team member resource group. That's what that tmrg acronym stands for at get lab, and we um we were discussing how women from that group could get more involved with the get lab community and- and we also wanted to showcase how git lab could be used for things beyond code.

B

So that's how it started and now we'll be having each speaker talk about ways that they use get lab in their different daily in their different job functions to manage their day-to-day.

A

Responsibilities, and with that I would like to introduce our four speakers. For today we have leslie blanchard, melissa, yushikov, taylor, medlin and holly reynolds, and they too will tell you more about themselves as they begin to present and as I wrap up today's intro and y'all learning about what beyond code is, we will, I would kick it off to the speakers and they will deliver their beyond code hex.

A

We have a fun interactive activity and we will definitely give you more details on how to get involved with gitweb, but we also have some resources for you. We want to share. If you scan the qr code, it will take you to a drive where you will see the pdf file and you can follow along.

A

We also have a form where you can drop in questions for the speakers, questions for nursey and I and we will make sure that they get answered so I'll. Give you a moment to scan the code and also possibly click the bitly link or get into the drive mercy. Do you want to share the link in the chat? Please.

B

Yeah, actually I see that heather lessons uh beat me to it. So thank you very much.

A

So we'll go ahead and get started leslie. Are you ready.

C

I am thank you jamie.

C

So, um as jamie mentioned, I'm leslie blanchard, um my favorite movie. um I would be shocked if anybody on this call knows the movie, but it's still my favorite, um it's pure country featuring george strait who's, a country, music singer, and it just so happens to be his birthday today.

C

So um we'll go on to the the next slide jamie. um So I run the global field. Marketing team here at good lab we've got um folks in the us, emea and asia pacific, and we use issue templates to basically build our plans and communicate with our stakeholders, and um we also have built a triage process with one of our third party vendors that I'll go into a little bit more detail about.

C

So a hack- and this is not necessarily a hack- it's just how we use um the uh the system, the gitlab system, to to run our business.

C

So um do you ever find yourself kind of doing repetitive tasks or adding repetitive information um into into issues um we do, and so what we came up with were issue templates, so we have about 10 to 12, maybe a little bit more issue templates that we use and my team is constantly communicating to people on the date of an event that we're doing or the time or how do you access the the event that we're running, um and so our issue templates basically have slots for our team members to enter in all of this information, so they can communicate openly and effectively to the folks who they're trying to communicate to the other thing that we have found to be super powerful for us are the get lab labels, and I remember almost three years ago when I started a gitlab um labels, I was like.

C

Oh, we have like 10 labels on this issue, good news, it doesn't matter you can have as many labels as you want on issues. um They've been really powerful for my team in terms of um communicating like the quarter that this event will happen in or the the region. So, if we're working with the east part of the us, we've got a east label that we add um and we also within our marketing team. We run different um campaigns, so um we've got a devsecops campaign.

C

So if, if one of the campaigns that we're working on has the um is relevant to the devsecops campaign, then we'll add that issue on that label on to to the issue as well.

C

C

And then um issue boards are really how we surface all of the information in a in a way, that's presentable to uh to folks who aren't in the day-to-day details. So we've got quarterly issue boards.

C

We've got different issue boards run by uh by different stakeholders and the cool thing about the issue boards is, you can really create them. However, you want to create them based on the labels that you've added to to your issues um and then in terms of uh working with our third-party vendor.

C

So one of the things that we needed to do was basically build a triage process, and so again we use issue templates where we've got a list of all of the information that we need to provide this third party, and when that information has been given by the gitlab field marketer, then they add a label to communicate to the third party that the work is ready for them to be worked on, and then our third party actually uses the the issue board.

C

So they know what work is coming and what work they are working on right now and then what work has been completed and the cool thing about that is, you can just drag and drop um to change the the status of the the progress of the work. So on the next few slides, I just have some screenshots.

C

So this is what a regional issue board looks like for us: we're showing a bunch of activity that we're doing on the for the us east, and these are broken out by quarter, and um I love all the colors that are displayed here, but you can also hide those labels if the colors tend to be too much for you or the labels tend to be too much so we've got on here.

C

You know a screenshot of of the plans that we have per quarter so over to the next slide, and this is our our triage board. So um we build ours based on block if it's ready to be triaged, work in progress and then ready to review, and then you can't see, um but we've got closed over there on the other side. So this is where I was talking about. You can just drag and drop the issues based on the status of them, so it's been really great.

C

One thing that I love too about this is um we're asynchronous, so at any point in time we can log in and if we have a question on what's happening in in dallas as an example in texas, then we can hop in here and we can see what that field marketer in that region is working on so super powerful to collaborate into to share our plans.

C

And I think that was all for me.

A

Yes, thank you. Leslie.

B

We do have a question in the duck for me. Actually, which is, um would you can you describe what the field marketing team does for those that aren't familiar with that.

C

Yeah, so our field marketing team at go lab is responsible for working with our in-region sales team to help build, bring what we call a marketing qualified lead to a sales accepted opportunity, so we're running um virtual workshops where we've got folks being able to get hands-on working very closely with our um our essays. I think somebody's going to talk about essays in the future solutions. Architects coming up on this call, um and then we also run pipeline progression um campaign.

C

So if we've got an opportunity, that's in the pipeline and we want to get some more face time with them and then we'll run campaigns on that sort. I also have links in here. I think I'm not sure I haven't looked at the pdf, but we've got a whole handbook page with information that details out how we run our processes, how we built our triage process.

C

If you want to take um a detailed look at that, so I'll double check, um you can access those links in the pdf and, if not, then we'll get them uh out and share to y'all. So you can access that if you're interested.

B

Awesome leslie I'm taking notes in the docs, so at any time, if you want to drop it in there, I think that'd be perfect and we'll.

A

B

Have one more question from you for you and from samantha uh samantha? Would you like to vocalize or shall I do so.

D

Yeah I can both wise, hey leslie, um I'm wondering for teams who aren't already using labels if you have any like tips on how to start using them um on the learning and development team at gitlab, we kind of use them, but not very efficiently. I think, but they seem I'm like overwhelmed to start using them, because we have so many open issues. So I would love to hear your um advice on that.

C

Yeah, so the way that we took the approach with labels within the field, marketing group was we thought about what was the information that we were trying to display and who are we trying to display the data to so as an example on the screenshot james? If you want to go back to the other slide, um this shows the the east what's going on in the eastern part of the us, so we wanted to show our east sales team what we were doing to help them build and grow their pipeline um and so from there.

C

Then we thought okay. Well, we've got everything on east. If it's just a big long list, then how can we further help them um show? You know basically show how and when we're going to run campaigns for them. So that's where the quarterization came into play, um I'm trying to think of. Like you know, I would love uh you, do really awesome, walk and learn so like.

C

If you've got an idea on a walk and learn, then you know come up with a walk and learn label and people can um can really just go to your boards and see. Maybe topics of interest for them is how I might would recommend, starting um from the learn standpoint.

D

Cool, so it's more for, like a external from your team who's, looking at your board.

C

More than you're.

D

C

Right, well, I mean, but my team also they look at this um as well to see what they've got coming up in the quarters as well, um but really like, I said just think about how you're trying to present the data that you are are gathering in the issues. Yeah. That's really.

D

Helpful thanks.

C

You're welcome.

A

Nursey, do we have any more questions on the docket.

B

No uh not yet and we're at time, so we can move on and if others have, questions for leslie feel free to add them there, and if you have time at the end, we'll get back to them.

A

And up next we have um a presentation on product handbook, melissa. Take it away.

E

Hi y'all I'm melissa, ushakov and I'm a group manager for product management here at get lab and the product group basically figures out the roadmap and what we're working on next, which is uh what I'm going to be talking about. I think of myself, as I say, a professional cat herder how to take a bunch of desperate ideas from all over and put them together into a strategy and then guide teams toward implementing it. It's a really fun job and I enjoy it a lot.

E

um My favorite movie it's hard to pick one, um but if I had to, I would say pants. Labyrinth is an excellent movie. If you haven't watched it, uh I will say it's also kind of sad so get the tissues next slide.

E

uh So the use case that I'm going to talk about is something that is pretty uh normal. I would say for a product major to do, which is you have a strategy, um and you need to communicate that to all your stakeholders and you need a central place where they can always go and see that, like, I said, that's a pretty common activity for a product manager, but the way we do it here at gitlab is different.

E

So I thought I would share that with you and hopefully you can think of other ways to apply this principle.

E

um So you've heard uh some of us talk about the handbook, so that is I'll go into what that is in a little bit with some screenshots, uh but we have. Each product manager has a page that we call the product direction, which is um basically we contain contains information about our strategy, uh our roadmap, uh what we're doing and what we're not doing- um and things like that and each product managers updates that monthly, so far, pretty normal um as to how everyone does it.

E

uh But how it's different here at gitlab is that that page is basically in a repository in gitlab, and we use merge requests to update the direction. um As you heard before in this presentation, everyone can contribute is a value here that we take to heart, and that includes on updating the product direction.

E

We make merge requests and then we invite our teams to collaborate uh with us product managers to make sure that we're on the same page about where we're going uh with the product next slide. Please uh so you've heard us, like, I said, talk about the handbook.

E

I've included a link to it here, but in short, it's a place where we describe everything about how, when uh you know what every department in the company does it's sort of like a operational uh central place where we describe how we do everything, uh and that includes uh product processes and also product direction, which is what I'm focusing on today.

E

So I included here an example of a direction page. I included the link, so you can visit it later, so you can get an idea of the type of content, but you see there at the top. We uh describe what it is. We say the last time it was updated and then we go into detail about what the team's working on when they're working on it and who our stakeholders are- and this is something that for git lab- is available on the internet because we're a fairly open company.

E

But if you chose to go uh this route, um you can make it a private page right, it's really up to you and your company. um How would you would like to do this.

E

um So you saw the page uh if you visit it you'll see at the very bottom, there's a link that says edit in the web ide.

E

So that page is actually markdown, which I would say don't be intimidated by you can keep it as simple as you want with just plain text and links and then, as you get more comfortable with it, you can add more formatting and make it a little bit more fun.

E

But you can go to that page click edit, make changes and then submit a merge request.

E

uh So this is what it looks like this one's in merge. I thought it might just be helpful to include a screenshot of one but where the magic happens is once you tag your team and you start to get feedback about what you've, uh what direction you've set for your product.

E

So next slide, please within the merge request, there's an area where people can leave comments and people can also even make suggestions.

E

So, if there's specific wording changes you see on the screenshot with orithe um she's made some specific wording changes that she would like. um You can see also a collaboration from my engineering team, where they're suggesting um you know additional items to add, but you really can invite a lot of collaboration from your team, um because, while the product manager sets the direction, all of us are responsible for uh delivering it. So it's really important for all of us to be on the same page.

E

So I've found this an extremely um helpful way to go through this process. In the past I would have powerpoint documents with version. One final version, one final final, which is different versions floating around uh doing this. All in get with merge requests, has been uh super helpful, just having a single source of truth next slide.

E

uh The other thing that's super helpful about doing it. This way, too, is that you now have a history of basically every change. That's happened with your direction uh centrally available to everybody.

E

uh So if you ever have a question like when do we decide to work on this or um how come um we prioritize this item, you can go back, look at the file for your direction and figure out exactly when a change happened, link it back to a merge request. So you can see the discussion that happened with that change and get more context.

E

So this is really important again to have the history of changes and for everyone to have access to that information at any time. There's a lot of times when I've visited the direction page that I was working on, um that I inherited from somebody else, and I was able to get a lot of context about a specific change when it happened um so today I talked about um doing this.

E

For a direction page or a roadmap, but you can think of this concept as applied to basically any document that you collaborate with other people in and that you want to get feedback and sort of keep a living history of changes.

E

B

Awesome, thank you. I think uh I don't see any questions here, so I think we're good to move on to the next one. Thank you so much melissa. Thank you. Melissa.

A

And next we have pre-sales games management with taylor.

F

All right, um so I kind of chose to go in a little bit of a different direction with mine. So hopefully it's interesting to everyone that attended. um I'm taylor medlen, I'm one of the solution: architects here at get lab, um so I'm part of the customer success or sales org.

F

Typically, what I do is I work with commercial and small business customers uh pre-sales as they're, going through like their technical evaluations for any demos and then really just helping them kind of see the value of git lab and how they may be able to use it for their specific teams, engineering and non-engineering.

F

um If I had to think about what my favorite movie was um I'd, probably choose legally blonde, that's probably pretty pivotal for me as a young woman, uh so yeah, I love it still, recite all the words it's awesome, um so we'll go into kind of one of my. It is a great choice. Thanks pj um welcome to kind of how I use gitlab for work and then also how I use it my personal life, um so starting off as a commercial essay, we are typically not aligned to specific account executives.

F

um So we kind of pick up accounts based on who has bandwidth or who has like specific skills and we self-select, so we've needed a way to see what customer engagements need to be assigned and where the team's at with their bandwidth next slide.

F

So much like everyone else, we kind of use a few of the same things. Also sorry, if you hear any puppies crying in the background, he's very excited, um so we typically use an issue board issue, templates labels and issue weights on our team with the issue boards we're generally looking at who's, picking up what what issues and accounts need to be assigned.

F

What's actually been accomplished. The issue templates allow us to provide our account executives or aes, a bunch of information that they can autofill, and it helps us figure out what we need to be successful in this engagement. We're also using labels to denote what kinds of tasks are associated with that opportunity and then we're also using issue weights assigned to the specific tasks or labels. So we know uh kind of who's at capacity next slide.

F

So hopefully you can see uh this screen. This is just a look at kind of what one of our issues would look like. I mocked it up with sample company data, because I probably can't.

G

F

Out all of our customer information, um but you can kind of see here so in our description, we have details about their request, what they actually need from us um if we're going to go through like email, q, a any specific discovery or demos or a proof of value, which is what we call a proof of concept or like a guided trial.

F

um You can also see we're asking for specific information around that customer's implementation. What they might need to do uh the environments they're working in as well as any languages and then the things that are important to them so like what are their pain points? What are the required capabilities? What do we need to do to make this successful?

F

You can also see over, on the right hand, side. We have an assignee, which is me and typically our account executive. Is there as well? You can see any time spent, so you can track time within git lab if there's a specific due date, there's a cat on my keyboard. Sorry, um you can see that as well as well as any of the labels um yeah, so those are all being automatically assigned when an account executive puts in an issue request and they kind of have control over that. I do need a cat herder thanks.

F

Well uh next slide, so this is just kind of a sample of what one of our boards looks like you can see. We've got some open issues. You can see the labels that have been assigned to them. It looks like a couple of them are going to give a demo in discovery. You can see also the assignees, and you see that one of the tailors has there's no issue weight, they're, not really doing anything, the other tailor.

F

It looks like she's pretty busy with a weight of 25, and then you can see what's been closed as well, so in real life, our team's using this- and we can see everyone across the team for the americas division uh who's working on what if they might need, help things like that uh next slide, so the fun one, um I've been running a dungeons dragons campaign for uh about a year and a half. Now we try and play about twice a month um when I started working at gitlab.

F

I wanted a fun way to use it. I guess so. I've used it to track kind of how our players are leveling, keeping track of quests and just keeping the whole campaign well managed. So next slide.

F

So for this I'm using a couple of different things. So we have the concept of milestones within gitlab, which is essentially like a time box that you can associate different issues to the issues and boards as per usual scoped labels, and then our wiki. I have some screenshots of those as well, so on the milestone piece. A milestone in gitlab is, like I said, before, a time box, so you have like a set amount of time that you're going to be doing something, and you can associate issues to these milestones.

F

What I've done is. I know that my players are going to level up specific ways and there are things they need to get done to actually achieve that level.

F

So I've associated issues to the milestone and I can see the progress based on how many issues have been closed to know when I'm able to say yes it's time to level up, it's really helpful in a larger campaign, where you kind of have to plan everything, that's going to happen far in advance, so you know just kind of what they need to complete and I never want to have to calculate experience points. It's never fun.

F

um You can also see here so I mentioned the issues associated with the milestones before these are a bunch of different tasks. You can see I'm using issues for the things they need to investigate or the quests. You can also see at the top. I have these scoped labels. These scoped labels are denoting where, in the campaign something's going to happen. These are major places or events, things that are going to happen.

F

Yes, super nerdy I actually presented on dmd for contribute as well last year, so it's all good um yeah, so pretty straightforward there and then the last one. uh You can also use a wiki within gitlab to keep track of your session notes. I use it to keep track of my dm notes. uh These are definitely a little sanitized just in case there's anything weird there, but, yes, you can use the wiki either within the ui or it's based off of a separate git repository. So you could also create wiki pages.

F

That way, if you would like to do it locally, uh just a fun way to use get one, and I think that's it. For me.

B

Awesome, thank you so much um so we do have a couple of questions. um There's one that's being answered by melissa as we speak that has to do more with the product handbook. So I'll start off with the other one. That's meant for you first, um which is how for me, how are weights assigned, can you add any weight from 100 or how is the numerical value leveled across people and teams, basically like? How do you standardize on that, and can you go a little bit more into what that means.

B

Oh taylor, if you're trying to speak, you're, muted, maybe you're not trying to speak.

F

Really someone's for me, um so the question was around the issue: weights associated to like the essay tasks yeah exactly. um We decided on basically arbitrary amounts for the specific things that we have to do so like a demo is a lower issue weight than a proof of value. We know it's going to take a lot of time and effort to actually go through this proof of value. It's like a four week process. It takes tons of meetings lots of time, but a demo.

F

It's like you're going to spend an hour on this, maybe like 30 minutes to prep, so we just assigned weights to these specific tasks based on just kind of our experience and how we know we have to prepare for something um so yeah, maybe hopefully that helped answer yeah.

B

Is there um like does? Is there a handbook page or something that says we use weights between one and a hundred or one in a thousand, or do you know what I mean like yeah? Somebody could.

F

You know I'll double check to see if we've updated the commercial page. For that specifically, I probably and I can post the link back in this note stock after awesome.

B

Thank you, okay. So since we do have three minutes left before the next speech and let's, if the other person would like to vocalize what they asked about the documentation and if not, I can read it out, would you like to vocalize it.

B

Okay, I'll go ahead and vocalize on their behalf; essentially it they are asking about what guidance do you have for docs on gitlab, including other media content, for example, videos, etc?

B

I think that they have a handbook of sorts as well and they're just looking for tips, so I see melissa you've started to answer. Do you want to vocalize some of what you've started to write there.

E

uh Sure, I would say um we also maintain our documentation within gitlab and we follow a similar process I'll find relevant links to our documentation, update process.

E

So I will put those links here in the document when I, when I find them, but I would say number one: is I'd recommend having a standard process for how you accept uh contributions to your playbook. If you're interested in kind of sourcing from within your company I'd say, I would recommend that just so that you have basically a lot of ears and a lot of eyes on the ground in your company right for when changes need to happen. There are some get lamp features that uh would be useful to take advantage of that.

E

We use here at gitlab for contributions. One of them is merge. Request templates right, so this is gives you the ability to have a sort of checklist for anybody. That's making an update to your documentation just make sure they've kind of followed your preferred guidelines.

E

Another feature that is useful is uh code owners right, so you can specify specific people that must approve a change uh in case you wanna sort of have that change vetted by specific people who are responsible for specific areas of your playbook.

E

uh Another thing that would be useful to look into and you can likely take some of what we've done um from our own documentation is that you can set up pipelines to basically check for specific things like linting.

E

Our documentation team has a pretty comprehensive list of things that they check for when documentation changes are submitted. So that's something also to look into, and that will make it so that it's even easier for anybody to contribute to your playbook, because you have the proper, proper checks and balances in your uh in the different jobs that run. I don't know if that's what you were um thinking, uh but if you have follow-up questions um you can verbalize now.

G

um Thanks, you said verbalize, okay, I I'm I'm I'm not in north america anymore, so you guys are saying localized, localized and verbalized, which I think is amazing, um but just thank you for the feedback, melissa and thanks for this conversation, um I'm about to start the like. We've done a content collection process. We had a four thousand person event where we had people give input, um and now I need to get get to get to the content piece right and and always have that collaboration and open method.

G

So thanks so much and I'll probably keep following up over after I convinced the team. This is what we should do anyway, thanks.

B

Awesome. Thank you all right back over to you. Jamie.

A

Thank you nursey and thank you all for your great questions as well, and we have our last speaker today and it's going to be on driving design and decisions by holly.

H

Thank you so much it's hard to follow d d. That's such a such a tough act! So hello, everyone, my name, is holly reynolds. I am a senior product designer here at get lab on the plan team and I'm going to be sharing today about driving design decisions with remote, ideation research and design discovery.

H

My specific group is project management, so we focus on things like issue management, labels milestones and iterations, it's hard for me to say what movie is my favorite, but I'm a big fan of all things, sci-fi and horror. So I think you can't go wrong with those categories as far as I'm concerned next slide. Please.

H

So our teams are, of course, fully remote, including product ux and engineering, and this means that we need to be able to remotely conduct all of our discovery work for new product related ideas. We need to be able to lead and participate in research for understanding and validating those ideas and brainstorm and collaborate with others, including users and stakeholders, so both internal and external folks.

H

In many companies this process happens synchronously. So this often occurs in person around a whiteboard with a bunch of sticky notes and some music playing. These are often really energized and creative environments.

H

Research may happen online or in person depending on the type of research and who's involved, but it still needs to be documented for future reference and synthesis as well as for sharing with others.

H

In all cases, these are highly collaborative experiences and decisions can change very quickly, so we've also found that asynchronous ideation and collaboration can at times result in a bit of a loss of momentum, so discussions can kind of stall excitement and interest can wane over time. Creativity can feel a little stifled that energy that occurs around the whiteboard and those synchronous settings can feel a bit lost. So we've had to be mindful of how we approach these sessions and explore ways to reduce some of these problems. Next slide, please.

H

So our challenge is that we need to be able to conduct remote brainstorming and research quickly and seek ways to reduce any loss of inclusivity or collaboration opportunities during these sessions remember being fully remote, we want to ensure that everyone can contribute. You've, probably heard a theme today with gitlab. This is very important to us, regardless of time zone or availability.

H

Next slide, please so just two quick hacks that I'll quickly share today include creating research, brainstorming and feedback issues for sharing ideas and for collaborating with others and then viewing and discussing opportunities visually using our design management feature next slide. Please so currently we're working on some high level, exploratory work and plan on how we might improve the issue experience.

H

One common synchronous, ideation approach involves proposing a problem to a group of stakeholders asking them to quietly write possible causes of the problem and solutions on individual sticky notes. Time boxing that so that's typically two to five minutes, then having them vote quietly on their favorite ideas by typically putting a dot or a sticky beside each and that's also a time boxed activity.

H

This is a great way to really quickly brainstorm on a problem and kind of narrow down ideas to a few select solutions, and I wanted to try to mimic this using an issue recently.

H

So I started by creating that issue. Asking for ideas surrounding a specific topic in this case help us improve the issue experience.

H

I worked with my manager to set some basic constraints to help us stay focused on our goal, shared it internally, via several slack channels and externally on social media, asking folks to comment on it with their ideas within 48 hours and requesting that they put as many ideas out there as possible, then ask them to come back and vote on their favorite ideas within another 24 hours after that, first window.

H

All of these instructions were listed within the description of the issue and the time boxing aspect was managed using that due date feature within issues. This approach saved us days of time and trying to track down in terms of trying to track down candidates for user research. We received over a hundred responses, which was amazing, and that was just in about three days with a weekend sandwiched in between time boxing.

H

The responses encouraged engagement and set up set expectations for when and how to respond, and we now have documented public feedback that we can easily share with stakeholders surrounding a larger discovery idea, as well as several actionable items that we can take away and work on next slide, please so just quickly moving into our second hack.

H

This is related to our design, discovery or sorry, design management feature related to some design discovery work. I recently did so if you're not familiar with this particular feature, it's a feature found in issues that allow you to upload design assets such as wireframes, mock-ups, screenshots or other images, and store them in one place within that issue to collaborate on them.

H

This is a screenshot of design management for our issue, where I had uploaded some low fidelity designs and, as you can see, we have quick implementation of the features, so you can just drag and drop directly into the ui there. Your images you can filter by the latest version, which helps us to know what's been put up most recently see all of the uploads.

H

I think it goes up to 10 as previews within a single view and that's helpful if you've got maybe multiple examples and need to specifically kind of pull one out you can archive older designs to help reduce some of that visual noise and minimize confusion between similar versions and we have automatic versioning as well. So if I want to revert back to a previous design, I can do that too.

H

Finally, there's a figma plugin as well, which connects figma directly to gitlab and enables the option to push those design changes directly to an issue that reduces some of the back and forth as designers that we have to do when going between tools and collaborating with teams. Next slide, please, and so this is a simple recording of the image detail, view within design management and using this feature we were able to easily tag areas of a very specific point in the design.

H

So we can collaborate on those particular elements I can at mention or tag my pm engineers and other designers in the comments for the image which notifies them via email and a to do to solicit feedback or just have them review created to do for myself related to this specific deliverable.

H

The comments within the images uploaded to design management can also be resolved. So, if you're, a fan of that feature in merge requests where you can resolve those comments and kind of simplify that conversation, that's something that you can do within this design management collaboration view as well, and finally, I can download copies of the images if I need to to be able to pull them into a slide deck.

H

For example, we do use tools also externally, like figma and mural, for design creation, but issues in design management are the core features for our day-to-day design. Ideation collaboration and research here at git lab and just one little side note: gitlab's design management also accepts these scratchy low 5 pencil designs just as easily as the high fidelity design, so don't be afraid to sketch out a design and upload it to get that quick feedback and to get your team aligned using visuals. That's it for me. Thank you so much.

B

Awesome, thank you so much holly. I do see a question from somebody um basically asking: can you give a link to the figma plug-in for gitlab? I think they were interested in that integration. I.

H

Will locate it and I'll put it in our google doc.

B

Awesome, thank you so much. um I think. That's it then jamie.

A

Thank you, and I want to give a huge thank you to all the speakers for taking time to build out these decks and share these lovely hacks with everyone um and again like rc mentioned, please, if you have any additional questions, please drop them in the doc, and our speakers will answer them accordingly.

A

B

I'm so sorry I it looks like I missed a question in the chat, so holly you're still around um okay. So here's a question from elin um holly: do you run into any issues getting timely feedback from folks who are only used to synchronous collaboration.

H

B

H

That is a great question. It does happen sometimes, but one of the things that I love about gitlab is that we do have a certain amount of grace that we kind of give one another knowing that we are fully remote and that sometimes someone is on literally the other side of the world in a different time zone. So we we kind of give a little bit of grace.

H

If we do need to get quick feedback from someone, then we can kind of ping them synchronously if need be, but those people are pretty good about responding fairly quickly. So it's generally not too much of a problem.

F

B

B

A

Glad I caught that one before.

B

Nope that looks like it's: it.

A

All right so now we're going to transition over to our fun interactive activity. um I don't know if you're familiar with slido, but we have a short quiz coming up.

A

So if you want to scan the qr code and or put in the bitly link and then once you go to the website, you can just type in the hashtag beyondcode1 it'll. Take you directly to the slido for this activity.

B

And fun fact that we will be entering the top um winners or the people with the top scores into a swag, giveaway, so exciting, stuff.

A

So I'll give y'all a minute to start joining.

A

A

Is everybody able to log in okay with the slido links in qr.

A

A

All right: well, it looks like there's a lot of git lappers, that's going to be getting some swag today, but we will go ahead and get started.

A

So the first question is which gitlab feature can help. You gather repetitive information go ahead and key in your.

A

A

How many of y'all got it correct? It was issue templates on to the next one.

A

Christina you are in the lead.

A

Next, what does sa.

A

A

A

Great job everyone christina you're on it. Next, what is used to make updates to the.

A

A

A

Correct and let's see who's in the lead again, oh christina somebody took your spot. Larissa has a lead now.

A

And what does taylor use for session.

A

A

All right and final question: how does holly support remote.

A

A

So now we have our top five and we will enter you into a raffle to see what swag you're gonna get.

A

So thank you all for participating, and I hope you all learned something great today um and again I'll reiterate. If you still have questions after the presentations are over, please feel free to drop questions or comments into um the doc that was shared earlier today.

B

Yeah and don't go away just yet. We have a little bit more information, we'll wrap up, and then, if we have any uh last few minutes, we'll we'll um open it up for questions.

B

um Essentially, some of the features that our speakers talked about today are only available in our paid tier, and so we wanted to make sure that people knew about our free community programs, because through these programs you can access all of our features, our top level for free.

B

We currently have a git lab for education program for open source and for startups and we're evaluating, adding a non-profit one in the future and follow this link to learn more about each of these, but you can apply to those and get not only the top features, but also 50 000 ci minutes per month. So I want to make sure that everybody here knows that that is a resource. That's available next slide, please, and since we love seeing your wonderful faces, we'd also love to have you join our community.

B

There are many different ways to contribute, whether you're into engineering into writing, documentation, translating design or simply just engaging.

B

We have ways that you can participate so feel free to scan the qr code or visit the url to visit our contributor guide next slide and since um jamie is actually in charge of meetups here at get lab.

B

We also encourage you to organize a meetup near you or for around a subject that you're interested in, and you can either ask her directly or check out our page and we have bitly slash, get lab meetups and we I wanted to call it out that we have a get lab diversity, scholarship program, where we're really looking to organize events. Also, that might be that have incorporate some element of creating a more diverse and inclusive community or product focus, just incorporate diversity.

B

Inclusion um so check that out, since we do have some financial scholarships available for those events.

B

uh We would not be a great product without your direct feedback and, as holly said we, you know really appreciate whenever you take the time to respond to our surveys or any feedback mechanisms that we provide, and we have a program called the get lab first look program where you can sign up and be contacted as we have various research studies.

B

It's a way to give your feedback and directly influence the direction of our of our product.

B

It's also really appreciated whenever you share your experiences with us and please feel free to tag gitlab or with, in this case, um we'd love to see some posts sharing your experience here at beyond code, um but this is a great way not only to stay up to date with what we're up to at get lab, but also to contribute, because by amplifying our messages, you're helping us as well.

B

We also have a conference coming up in august. It's our annual user-facing conference called get lab, commit from august 3rd to 4th, and the cfp just closed. Unfortunately, but there's going to be a great lineup of speakers, and so we encourage you to attend and participate there.

B

It will be virtual, so anybody can uh attend, and with that um we just we hope that you've enjoyed this first event of the series and we'd love to hear your feedback um ways that we can improve things that you liked about it things that um you know just any ideas that you have for us.

B

Please follow this link and it's also linked to in the google doc so that it's easier to access all right with that jamie. Do you want to wrap it up.

A

Thank you narcy um again, I want to say thank you for all those who attended today and um hope you enjoyed the kickoff to the beyond code event series. There will be at least three to four coming through in the summer, so please be on the lookout for that as well and a huge thank you to all the speakers who again took time to um help with this inaugural event as well. So thank you again and if you have any questions, please drop them in the doc and we look forward to connecting you offline.

A

Thank you very.

A