GitLab Remote Work, 10 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: Value of documentation and transparency for remote teams | AMA with GitLab, Shopify Plus, & Fellow

Description

We asked Mark Bergen, Head of Revenue at Shopify Plus, if Shopify has always documented their processes or if this became even more important once they went remote.

Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab, also weighed in with his thoughts around GitLab's documentation processes.

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A

Mark has your team always documented older processes, or is this something you started doing now that you're working remotely we.

B

Probably fall in the middle Shopify is a fairly documentation heavy company, all the documentation can take many forms, and so certainly we have an internal repository we refer to as the vault. We have lots of information, there's lots of information being documented right now and digital like default. What does that mean? You know we're still sorting out a lot of things.

B

There's a lot of questions that we've taken on is we've gone through this, and so we are being transparent about the way we think about it with our people we're trying to be very transparent in our decisions and trying to create. You know, as Darren said kind of want single source of truth, that people can go to to understand. I think what I'm finding is kind of a revenue leader within the businesses, which is a new one, is well a lot of our major decisions, get documented in our thinking and planning in those pieces.

B

There's a lot of day to day pieces that, when you're in a physical location you get super used to just you know the over the monitor conversation or grabbing someone in the hallway. The lunch line even slot to degree where quick decisions are made.

B

They disappear depending on how you set slack up in ninety days or you know, 180 days, and so there is I think some learnings that we're starting to recognize that some of the things we've taken for granted so now is being institutionalized knowledge or if we make a decision, everybody heard and everybody's aware they're, not anymore.

B

It might be between two people on slack or two people over hang out or a zoom blank, and it's now time to actually get more serious about how we document so we're doing that, certainly with our projects and how we think about major initiatives we have underway, but it is I'm starting to realize and I won't say, I'm good at it yet but I'm starting to realize the importance of it for a lot of decisions I've taken for granted up until now. That's.

A

Interesting and I was gonna, ask there and like there, and you have a lot of experience with this. Do you have any tape service practices for teams that just like Marc's team are just getting started, or you know implementing this documentation processes yeah.

C

So the challenges that were verbalized there are very real and we do a couple of things to try to address those at get lab.

C

We have transparency as one of our core values and we actually have a key performance indicator where we quarter-over-quarter try to make sure that the percentage of slack messages set as private or direct messages actually goes down, and the ratio of the public messages sent go up and that helps more decisions be made in public so that they're broadcast to the broadest amount of people which goes along with our mission of everyone, can contribute.

C

We want as many eyes on things as possible so that if people even outside the organization, have feedback or have an idea or they've heard something from one of their other client consultations, they're able to pour in now. This only works because a few of our other sub values, like no ego and blameless problem, solving short toes I love short toes. It means everyone to get laugh at short toes, so it's impossible to step on anyone's proverbial toes.

C

You have to have some of these cultural underpinnings in place to empower people to be that transparent and show their work, even if it's in draft- and we believe that everything is under construction and we have no issues at all shipping, something that is just a Minimum Viable Product, just a better iteration.

C

You really have to adopt all of these things for this to feel really succinct, otherwise, to Mark's point you're kind of you're missing out on some of those hallways conversations where decisions get done very quickly, but in private and so in a remote setting. You just have to get a lot more comfortable with decisions being made in public and and operating with no ego.

A

Yeah sorry mark, please continue.

B

I was gonna, say actually to come from that I think really hit on Darren mentioned kind of the concept of trust. We talk a ton about trust and we use this concept of a trust, battery journal and Shopify, and one of the things that we've talked about internally a little bit and kind of recognize that I'm, really starting to notice now in a remote environment is if you want to be transparent. It means also you're going to see some of the messy stuff along the way. It's not buttoned up.

B

We don't have all the answers, we're learning as we go we're making decisions as we go, but here's how we're thinking about it and here's the process for going through, and we expect a fairly high degree of trust with one another that you'll accept that you know you're, seeing how the sausage is made.

B

It's not done yet and that's been really important for us and I think one of the things that we continue to focus a lot as on as a company and I would encourage others who are thinking about or considering what this world looks like. It's really strong or pin, and trusses Darren mentioned the other thing.

B

Actually, no I realize this is not intended to be about fellow, but actually we've adopted fellow, quite heavily internally and it's a fantastic tool for us for just rapid documentation in one place around meetings, we're having group meetings forwarding or having kind of common agenda items or kind of continuing to roll forward for meetings, and so we've started to adopt some tools like that that we have found to be really helpful in capturing documentation in one place and something you can always refer back to in written format.