GitLab Tanuki Tech, 11 Aug 2023

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: TT210 - Create and Plan

Description

This is a Tanuki Tech session on 8/11/2023.

For more on Tanuki Tech, see here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/revenue-marketing/sdr/tanuki-tech/

For more on the speaker, see here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-wang-0835b226/

A

Well, this is the next step of um your your journey Kenya in terms of enablement. um The goal of today's session is to talk about some of our core value drivers and to get a little bit more advanced sales messaging.

A

Okay, uh so I want to talk about the core part of our product and then we're going to eventually talk about how to use it in your conversation, so that you can win more business. How does that sound? For you, great okay,.

B

A

So sounds good, so just a Rec cap. This is a visual of what our product does we're specifically going to talk about just this core chunk today, um and this is really around our source, control management and our project management.

A

Okay, um so literally like a core part of our product, so just as an overview with Source Control Management. One of the big challenges that we have is that many people think that we just do. Source Control, Management, um I I would actually say that probably like 75 80% when they say like oh G, lab that's cool. We already have a tool for sem, but the challenge is most people don't realize that we do much outside of this area right.

A

um So I I want to talk about some of these in particular right now um and how to use this in your sales conversations I think that it's really really really important to sell our platform and not to just talk about our sem and our project, manag capabilities, because the reason why is because there's a million SC and project management tools, all right so as an example of this, if I type in project management options, ranked I can get a list of 40 best project management tools um and in all honesty, these things are not considered strategic.

A

So what I mean by that is when you go to a hardware store, and you wanted to get like a tape measure, how much time and energy do you go into figuring out which tape measure to get a.

B

A

B

Do if you don't do your research for me, then I, don't know anything about that. If I don't do my research before going probably a lot.

A

Okay, so let me give another example: if you, if you are like buying a hammer like how much research do you do on which Hammer to you get.

B

That much just go there and show what I like the most one. Second.

A

Yeah there the same thing so with Source, Control Management, it's considered a commodity all right. A lot of everyone has Source Control Management Solutions, and it's not considered strategic okay. So going back to how do we stand out then? Well, how we stand out is we're platform. There aren't very many platforms out there and matter of fact we're one platform for all of software development delivery, all right. So in general, what I'm saying is sell in the platform don't sell in our individual source, Control Management project management differentiators.

A

We will, however, go into some of them just so that I can help to sharpen that saw.

A

Okay, all right, okay, cool, so I want to start talking about Source, Control, Management first and to sort of like take a step back. We need to understand what a programming language is. um What a programming language is? It's it's literally just it's just like ways of telling computers to do things. So what I mean by that is how much do you.

B

Cook uh pretty often I think.

A

Yeah, so you were looking at recipes all the time. If you have like a recipe, then you.

A

Do you do like step, one step, two step, three step, four right, it's the same thing for a computer. What a computer does is all of this code here, it's literally like what computers do. Is they just going to read your code and then they're going to do it sequentially? So literally, all of this code here for gitlab. What it does is.

A

It runs gitlab, but you could have F lines of code that tell you that if I click this button, then this pops up, okay, so more about programming languages, um every single application is like you can sort of think about it, like a big recipe um just like. If you follow a recipe you can make, uh you know like um chicken, tacos or tortillas, or something like that. Then, if you have a bunch of code and running it will make your application run. Okay. So why.

B

A

There different programming languages, it's just the same thing of like. Why is there different Spanish, Italian French Russian? All of it is just different languages that tell computers to do stuff, um syntax, they're different, just like how Spanish is different from Italian, which is different from German, but fundamentally it's just telling computers to do things. Okay, um one more thing. That's just kind of interesting to know is that some programming languages they have different purposes.

A

So what I mean by that is websites generally you're, using something like JavaScript and python if you're, using like statistical stuff, you're using usually like SAS or R um code, okay, so anyway, so I just want to show you an example of code in action, so I'm going to just switch over real, quick and and I'm going to share this little small, green thing um and I want you to tell me a little bit about what you what you see in here. What do you think this is talking about like keep in mind?

A

This is a recipe.

B

Right, it's uh making directories uh and deleting directories.

A

Right exactly right, so make make directories make directories. Do it three times sleep and then say deleted, delete directories right so I want you to tell me, like I'm, going to run this code now and tell me what happens to my computer when I run this.

A

Code, so what is happening to my computer.

B

By creating folders.

A

B

Just deleted and delting them.

A

Yeah exactly so long story short. What do programmers do all day? They write code that does stuff, probably not as simple as making folders, but it's like make buttons make code make scripts that runs every single application that we sell right. So that's the goal of why they're doing what they're doing all right so going a little bit more into Source Control Management.

A

um You need to have a tool for managing all the code that you have the reason why we have Source Control Management, there's two reasons: number one who made which change when right. So, let's just say that your customers start complaining about some part of your app not working one hour ago, all right well, which changes had happened in the application 1 hour ago.

A

This one came in you know: was it this one? No was it this one? No, it might this actually, so the customer is complaining about the login screen. This changes about the login screen. Okay, so the reason why we want to have Source control management or historical view of your code is that it's going to give you every single change that people made and then, when a customer issue comes in, then you can go back and you can undo these all right, so you can just like revert.

A

um So what is Source Control Management there's a couple of things number one history of the changes made number two. Imagine if you are like a global business uh and you have 2,000 Engineers all right. So what do you think would happen to like a Google doc if you had 2,000 people trying to edit it at the same time,.

B

It would be chaotic.

A

It' be there', be some issue right, so it's the same thing in a sense that here's our code on the internet, if you have 2,000 Engineers, trying to edit this code at the same time it's going to end up chaotic, so you need some way to manage that, like a source control system will help you with that. um So get is the most popular sem tool that doesn't mean that it's the only one there's other ones as well. Okay, um so imagine this is just sort of like you ever do this with school.

A

It's it's like here's. Your paper version, one version two you're like saving a different copy manually. Then you have one with edits and then one with styling added right. Then you have final right, so Source Control Management makes it so that you don't have to do this anymore. You can actually just go into.

B

This history view.

A

It's going to tell you the exact same thing: okay, all right, um one, more problem that Source Control Management tries to solve. So you ever write like a school project where it's like I have to write the introduction, and then you write the research method and everyone writes 20%, and then we want to copy and paste it together at the end and like get it into one report right. So what ends up happening all the time with this?

A

Is that it's real easy until you try to copy it all back into the same project and the reason why is because some person's in font 10 another person's in font 11 another person's spacing is different, so the formatting ends up taking a lot of time right. So the last problem that Source control management is trying to solve is when you have 2,000 people working on the same project.

A

There has to be some like way of organizing this and that's what source Control Management does so just to sort of talk a little bit about this you'll get asked this from time to time. In your conversations, um it's not super common, but sometimes but I just want to share you with you like. This actually works all right. So here's how the so this is how this works. um You have what they call like a master Central copy of all the code, all right so over here this gitlab code.

A

This could be like the master Central. It's the single source of Truth. Okay, like we already talked about it, doesn't make sense if 2,000 people are editing the single source of Truth all at once, because that's just going to make it crazy right. So what people actually do? Is they copy and paste all of the code from gitlab, and then they paste it onto a local version on their computer? So in.

B

A

Words, whatever is in gitlab they copy and paste it onto their their computer, so they're not editing the gitlab version. They're editing, this new version copy that you just copied from gitlab. Okay, so you're an engineer, you're, making your buttons or you're designing your new feature. You write some code every time so like when you write an essay you hit, save every once in a while right, because you don't want to lose your progress. So I'm writing my code. Every time I hit save it's what they call commit.

A

Okay, so I write my code I make a save or commit I write more code. I make another commit I write more code. I make another commit okay. So after a while I have like five saves, I have something that's actually good and then now what I want is I. Have this awesome stuff I want to get it back into the single source of Truth? So the way to do that is you create what they call um a merge request? Okay, so this is a request to merge code back into your master Branch.

A

So um over here you can see this change is to get rid of this red code. Add in the green code. It is a request toerge and then what happens with this is all of this awesome stuff that you've been writing on your own local copy. You want to get it back into single source of Truth so that other people can start using it. You see what I mean.

B

A

Okay, so after the merge request is accepted, yours is stuff is now in the master.

B

A

And the good news with that is now other people can use it. This is in sales. We get paid for meetings for opportunities for closed business. They get paid really for, like the amount of like work that they get into the master Branch.

B

Okay, be uh I, have a question. Could it be like the case uh that a few people were working in the same uh issue and when they merg it?

B

um How do we make sure that the best version is uh the one that merges or is only one person working on on one issue on.

A

One, that's a really great question so um how to make sure that only one person's working on an issue, that's why, on our issue board over here, you can see you literally assign someone so Alexander over here is supposed to be the person responsible for doing this.

A

If you are someone else who does this you're actually going to get in trouble because you're doing something that you didn't ask to do it almost as like, like I'm doing someone else's job, it's considered like a little bit disrespectful, you see what I mean good so yeah that so that's what you call like a issue assign, um and so the the idea is once this has been assigned. Other people should leave it alone.

B

Sounds good and then what you were talking about before is just uh pulling the code uh copying in your uh workspace and then pushing the code to the main branch right.

A

Yeah thanks thanks for using that terminology. So when you want to get your code back into gitlab or like the single source of Truth, you would push it. That's what like a push means and then so um and then you'd have to create a merge request to get your code merged into the master branch, which is the single source of truth that everyone uses.

B

Sounds good yeah.

A

Okay yeah, thank you for asking those.

B

So just a recap:.

A

um So using more of the terminology, the first thing is not everyone's editing out of gitlab directly right. So the first thing that you do is you copy and paste the code into a identical version? So that's what they call branching, um so you're, not editing the master, Branch you're editing your own branch, which is like your own version of the code.

A

Okay, uh so you start making some changes. Every time you hit, save it's a commit. A commit is just hitting save to get it back in you create a merge request. um If two people try to edit the same code, then you could have this thing called a merge conflict and then that's just basically like it when it's just sort of like we need to figure out how we actually want to do this. um So, let's just say, 10 people they edit the same file.

A

Well, then you're going to have a conflict right, so you might have to resolve that and that's what they call merge conflict. The last thing is, you need to get necessary approvals to merge to code in so let's just say that, like it's a really important piece of the product, you might have to get someone where it's like your team lead has to approve it. Your manager has to approve it and one person director level has to approve it right. So that's what we mean by merge request approvals.

B

A

Let's just talk about some of the the the special things that we have um so once again to recap: we don't really sell by our differentiators with Source control management and project management, but if they ask it's a good example for us to talk about like what we do different, the other thing is some of these premium features it's a good way for us to go flip from like a free tier customer right because they don't have this right now, all right.

A

So if I'm talking to a free tier customer, some of the things that I'm going to mention is: if you want safer development or better reliability, then these are premium features. Okay. So let me talk about safer development right now, um so, if you want so right now in the free tier, you do have merge request approvals, but if you want to make it custom where, for these files, it's very important right.

A

This is a very, very important file, so you want to have manage one manager approval one person in the QA team approval one person in security team approval. Then that's a premium feature okay. um So there is an element of merge, request, approvals and free tiers, but if you really want to make sure that it's safer and that you have more controls around this, which is a good idea, especially if you're like have a mature product, then that is a premium feature. Okay.

A

The other thing that I want to talk about is better reliability, so I'm just going to go, draw a diagram with this real quick. um So let's just say that you are in the United States and um you have one computer running git laab in Chicago and you are an all remote company, so your developers are all around the country.

A

Okay, so so they're all accessing this gitlab server in Chicago now I have a question: what happens if an earthquake hits the server and it goes down? Can people write their code in any.

B

A

I think you're.

B

Muted, if you're using a Version, Control I, think you can edit the code in your computer, but you cannot push the code into the main visual repository right into the repository. So you have to I wait for that to be up again up and running.

A

Right, yeah, exactly that's perfect, so here's the problem, gitlab! If you only have one computer running it, it's not that reliable. So if you're an Enterprise or if you're public sector, what you do is you have a gitlab computer here here here and here and these gitlab computers they're running as a team, so that if this one goes down, then people can still access this one. This one this one, you see what I mean. So this is what we call Geo.

A

um This is another premium feature, so just to recap, if you want better reliability of gitlab because you want Geo or what they call High availability, what this really means is I want to have a team of gitlab servers that are running okay, I, don't just want one I want to have a team. The advantage of having a team is that if one of them goes down, you have other ones that you can still run.

A

Okay, so that's a premium feature when you go to a free user. They don't have this okay, okay, so just to recap, couple of Premium features number one safer development. If you want to have more rules around who's merging what when then that's something that is a premium feature, the other thing is: if you want better reliability in your Source Control Management, so you want to make it so that if this computer stops working, your teams around the world can still use gitlab, then that's what they call Geo.

A

They also call it high availability, but what this means is that you now have a team of gitlab servers that are running, and then this can help you in a situation like that. Okay, all right, okay, so can I help clarify anything with Source control management or we move on to project management.

B

We can move on.

A

Okay, great, so, let's talk about project management. Now um what is project management so so imagine you're, planning a wedding, all right! There's 300 people for this wedding, there's a lot of stuff that you need to do um who's responsible for each thing. What's the current status on catering?

A

What's the current status on the invitation list, how do you track progress right and then probably the most complicated thing is certain things need to be done in a certain order right, so it doesn't make sense to get decorations for your Venue until you know what the venue is right. So until you have that venue booked, you probably don't want to look into like how you're going to decorate it, because you just don't know what it even the place is going to be yet right.

A

So this this is an example of a wedding, but now imagine if you're, building like a big bridge or if you are building like um medicine right. So it's the same thing in which your project has hundreds of individual pieces and how does the business know who's doing what what the progress is and then how do we do these things in a way that makes sense right so they're big questions to answer so most businesses they have what they call a project management tool and what the goal of this tool is.

A

Is it answers these questions? So what are you? What do we need to do who's doing it where's the ball at and then which things are done? We need to be done in a certain order. That's what project management tries to solve for you, okay, a good project management tool is going to have you implement these things called smart goals, um there's a lot of research into human psychology, and it shows that people who make specific, measurable, achievable and relevant and time bound goals are more likely to be successful in anything all right.

A

So I just give you an example, so an example of a goal- that's not smart, is like I want to be healthier all right, so a better goal than that is I want to be able to get to be able to run three miles by the end of the month in 25 minutes right. So the reason why it's better is because it's measurable, it's specific, it's time bound and it's achievable right. So a lot of people. They have a lot of goals where it's like I want to get married. I want to.

A

You know like meet someone. I want to write a book. Well, did you write? One I want to write one chapter in the next month: that's a better goal right! Okay! So let's just talk about how this works for project software development, um so J uh like Trello these tools that are used for project management. This is what we're talking about here, um so I'm going to talk about what project management means for software development.

A

Okay, so you have your big project and then your big project, like I, said like imagine like if this is like a board for your wedding right for our engineering project. Each of these is like one part of your project, so for your wedding, it's like go send out invitations go find a venue go, find out who's, your bridesmaides, who are your Grooms people right? Each of these is like one item, so sometimes you want to group some of these to-do list items together.

A

uh So what I mean by that is give me all of the items that have to do with the venue. Give me all of the items that have to do with catering all right. So when you hear milestones and epics, that's just a group of the items that are outstanding, okay, so project management. What it does is, uh let's just share a little bit more, but.

A

Okay, this one okay, so in my to-do list, some of the things that it asks is who's doing it well over here, Allen's doing it right number two: what is this about number three? How do you people can collaborate on this? So it's like imagine you're that wedding planner right, so it's like you can ask around the team, like hey, I I found these three places. What do you think about them?

A

Another thing is: imagine that you were a wedding planner and there's a new wedding planner that gets put on the team, because everything is in the history here. If someone else were to start working on this project, people could see what other people have done in the past, because all of this is documented.

A

Okay, so in other words, let's just say that you're, the You're The Wedding Planner, you start doing all this work on a venue you realize someone else needs to take over the project because everyone's been writing down their work and their progress on the issue. Someone else external can come out and just read and get caught up very easily. You see so some things that it does is number one you can collaborate on it. People can comment on it and then so that can people can see that two.

B

A

Show a history of the progress um because of this. uh There are things that you can build on this, so, for instance, this is what we call like a burndown chart, all right, and so what a burndown chart is when our project started it had 645 issues, then it started going down going down going down. So if you're a planner one of the things your stakeholders are going to ask you, the time is Kenya when's the project going to be done right and then the answer is you're going to have to forecast this.

A

So you can say well, at our current run rate, I think we're going to be done around the middle of June and then so August just just give us a little bit of cushion. Why don't we say July time frame? Okay, so, in other words, project management is going to tell you when you can forecast your engineering projects, here's another thing, which is what they call um a road map. You can also call it a Gant chart.

A

You can also call it like a timeline, but let's just say that, like this is what each team is doing. So engineering team a is working on this from here until here, engineering team B is working on this CDE e f g h. I j k right and then, when you give me a visual of what's happening in my business, then there's a lot of things that I can figure out.

A

One thing that I can figure out is hey if this one that everything else is dependent on it needs to go first, because otherwise, if this doesn't work, then everything else is stuck right. So having a visual of all of your projects allows you to move them around. So let's just say that this is the most important one. Maybe I want to push this to the left, so we start earlier on it so that other things can like not get blocked. You see what I mean.

A

Okay, that was a little bit of a bad example in all honesty, but project management. It's software around for collaboration on projects, giving historical progress, and it's also about forecasting so forecasting how long your Project's going to take also knowing which projects need to be done in a certain order. So, let's just say that if project a doesn't work, then Project B, C, D and E they're all blocked because they can't move forward. Then maybe I need to make sure that project a is the one that we go first.

A

So giving me a visual of where all my projects are at helps me to understand as that business owner or VP, what's happening in my business, which things are strategic, which one should I actually forecast when and how do we make sure that we're on target right? So this project looks like it's at 81% done. That seems bad. Maybe we need to put more Engineers on here right. So it gives me a view of what's happening in my business.

A

Okay, so let's just talk about some of this stuff, real quick. um What are the benefits? The benefits is a well-run business. If you have good project management, your projects are going to run quickly and more efficiently than if you didn't have good project management. Okay, so that's the benefit of it. uh So let's talk about some of the key features. Okay, so let's just you go to to a free tier user and you want to talk about like what the difference is in premium.

A

The overall theme is, if you, if you're free tier, you can get basic project management, you can get a basic to-do list, but if you want some of this cool stuff so that burnd darn chart of what we saw um earlier, if you want to have be able to forecast this stuff, that's a premium feature. Okay, if you want to have these type of road maps, then that's another premium feature. Okay.

A

Another thing that's kind of like small I, wouldn't I, wouldn't mention this on I- would only mention this if, like um people are mentioning it, but over here in my issue, there's one person assigned, but, let's just say, I want to have three people working on this. Okay, if you're in the free tier, you can only have one person per issue, but if you want to get premium, you can now put down three people right. So multiple owners, um okay, so basically the theme of Premium is better project management.

A

If you want a basic to-do list, you can do that on free. If you actually want like forecasting, then you need premium. Okay for ultimate, that's really just taking it a step further. Now you're like a major business, you want to really do this well, and most major businesses do want to do this well because they need to make sure that their critical projects are running smoothly right. So some of these things is really about. Like you are a major business, you have complicated projects with multiple dependencies.

A

I need software that can manage all of that stuff and make sure that it's running smoothly, that's when you have need to have ultimate okay, so to recap, um free tier, is like a basic to-do list in functionality. If you want to have forecasting- and if you have like a medium-sized business, you really want premium. If you are like a large business with really complicated projects- and you want to do this really well, you need ultimate, okay, all right, so uh competitors in a project management space uh at lassan is the biggest one.

A

um Jira Trello and GitHub um GitHub has decent project management uh their platform as well. There's many different tools out there that are for project management and in general, as you already know, our sales motion with that Lan is to integrate with jira, but I want to talk about, are. Are you doing any? um Are you doing any out bounding around the Jirus server deprecation.

B

I haven't specifically done it, but I've been in conversations where my uh our clients um had to migrate to to Kit lab because because of this, so.

A

B

I haven't CED it yet.

A

Yeah, that sounds good, so just a recap: uh a little bit about the story of this, um so atlassian is ending some of their uh subscriptions by February 15 2024. So if you are an atlassian customer on some of these scriptions, you need to move off onto another platform, so our opportunity is, we can come in and say, hey notice that you have some of these subscriptions. Maybe now is a good time to explore another offering okay, so I just want to talk about this real quick. uh So if you want some of these atlassian.

A

Solutions, the first thing that they ask you is: do you want SAS, or do you want to run it on Prem right?

A

So if you answer on Prem, then they're going to ask you: do you want the Enterprise subscribe subcription or do you want the server subscription so now to sort of like answer the question of what the difference between their Enterprise and server tiers are remember that diagram of the United States and when we had one version of gitlab running if that one server of gitlab went down, people can't use gitlab anymore right. So if you're a business, you want one jira server, then that's the server subscription.

A

Okay, if you want a team of juros servers where there's a j server here here here here and they're all working as a team okay, then that's the Enterprise subscription okay, so they are getting rid of these server subscriptions. If you are a server like um person who uses the server subscription, you have to either go to SAS or their Enterprise tier, but imagine if you're a small business if you're a small business, do you want to go to the Enterprise tier.

B

A

No, it's too expensive right, um so this P this play is primarily like SMB midmarket, a lot of the Enterprise they're, probably going to have Enterprise tier and they're keeping their Enterprise subscriptions. You see what I mean.

A

All right, okay, cool! um So just a recap: uh what is the benefit of gitlab and how do we stand out? We do have differentiators in Source, Control Management. We do have differentiators in premium, but really the great value of gitlab and how we stand out from the pack of all of these project management tools. All of these Source Control Management tools is that we a platform right right and then so, if you just imagine this visual of like how many people are selling fruit here. Well, there's a lot of people selling fruit here right.

A

We have to stand out somehow and the way that we stand out is because we're a platform not just with s, control management but oo, project management, devc, Ops deploys. We are a single platform right and then so, uh just to recap: I lead with the fact that we're a platform this gives us a lot of differentiators other people don't have, and then, when the customer brings it to a conversation about like well tell me about your sem or tell me about your project management. That's when I go to the specific differentiators okay!

A

um So that's what we mean by G, lab being a single platform right.