Hey Daniel, hey Eric, welcome back here.

Thanks so much.

Yeah, it's great to be here.

Hi Virginia.

Hello.

All right, let's kick off.

I wanted to start out with some reminders.

First, we have a book club coming up on Inspired in four weeks on August 7th.

I just re-read it myself.

It's a good read.

It's highly aligned with how I think about product management and does a good job of explaining why some of these things are important that I also believe to be important.

So it's nice to have another voice explaining all of that.

So please do read that.

I think I'm going to update the new hire onboarding doc and ask all new hires to read this as well so that everybody in the team is on the same page with respect to this book.

Let's see.

Reminder B, remember there's this interview spreadsheet, CS and sales have populated that with a number of customer contacts for meetings.

Please do follow up on that.

I want to ensure goodwill with that team and follow up promptly with meetings with these customers so that that team can see that we're taking advantage of it.

Third reminder, we've got a little engagement survey.

I'm going to run this once a month in Q3, just to take a pulse given all the change going on.

Please do take a minute to fill it out.

It's five quick questions and then one free form where you can share whatever feedback you have.

Fabian didn't receive it.

I'm pretty sure I went through my emails.

Maybe it's on my end, but I'm happy to fill it out.

You didn't get it.

I need to get it to you.

All right.

I will.

I'll ask Jessica to resend that to you.

Anybody else in the same condition where you did not receive it?

I don't recall, but is there a way to put the link to the survey in the agenda?

Well, it's personal.

It's tied back to your user ID so we can track which team you're on and that kind of thing.

I do believe it's anonymous, but nevertheless, everyone has their own custom ID.

So I'll ask Jessica to send it to Fabian and Karina.

Anybody else?

I hadn't seen it, Scott, but I searched my email real quick and it looks like that's the title of the email.

So if you just search for that in your Gmail, you should be able to find it if you got it.

Pulse survey.

Okay.

If anybody else didn't get it, please ping me.

All right.

Next reminder, we have a goal of at least three customer interviews per PM.

There's an OKR issue out there.

If you haven't updated it lately, please do so.

And remember, we have three weeks until Q2 to hit our goal.

So please do invest the time to get those set up and get at least three done if you haven't already.

Next one, category maturity page.

Last week, we talked about this.

Josh did a great job of creating some new views, one of which is sort of this flow chart showing how mature we're going to be at a given point in time, which raised questions about whether we were forecasting that accurately.

If you haven't already, please go in and either confirm that it's accurate or update it.

Thanks to Kenny for creating that issue.

Somebody had a direction maturity page.

You want to talk about that?

That was just me, just as you referenced it, so I was adding the link there.

That's all.

Folks, if you haven't seen the updates there for the charts, just check it out.

So it's a good way you can get a sense for like, you know, it's hard when it's in tabular form, but when it's charted, it's much easier to see like if it's achievable or not based on some of the trends.

And there's also, if you scroll down, stage level trends as well.

So you can see how your stage in particular is trending or set to be trending.

Great.

Thank you, Josh.

All right.

Some team updates.

We hired a couple more PMs.

We got a good rhythm going on hiring.

We hired Gabe Weaver.

He originally came through the growth funnel, but we have a really strong candidate for that fourth slot.

So we're going to target Gabe for a third managed PM.

The charter of that team is to be defined, but bottom line, we're going to have a third group in the managed area and Gabe will lead that.

And then Dov Hershkowitz, we just hired him as the APM monitoring.

He's got a great background in monitoring and has most recently been at Elastic.

So thank you to everyone who's been involved in the hiring loop.

I know it's taking a lot of energy from everybody, but I think our hiring processes continues to pick up speed.

B2B worked with Christy and David Sakamoto to change some language around customer results.

Just wanted to make sure you all saw that.

So there's the MR. Hey, Scott.

On that one, the diff highlights what is new content, I believe, and there's one section that is great.

I can totally understand why we would add that about prioritize ruthlessly.

But then the rest is, I guess, a bunch of formatting changes.

And I don't know if there's new content in any of the dogfooding.

I guess the TLDR, the addition of that prioritize ruthlessly, or is there some other point we were trying to make in this change?

Oh, it's been a little while.

I think there were a number of changes, but before the handbook basically read that internal feedback is worth 10 times more than external feedback.

And I understand why we want internal feedback because of dogfooding and using our own product.

It's a great channel for feedback, but I think it was sending the message that customers weren't nearly as important as internal opinion.

And both Christy and I want to move off of that position.

Like we should be customer first and treat our own teams as a customer.

But I don't want people to interpret that our own internal opinion is worth 10 times more than a customer's opinion, if that makes sense.

So it was mostly language, wherever that showed up in the handbook.

Gotcha.

Okay.

The one comment that I had on this is that some of the text seems like we should focus on core competencies as opposed to new scope, as in we should focus first on what we're best at.

So anyways, that's one thought I had on this.

I don't remember that being the point of it.

Maybe it reads that way.

I don't know.

Feel free to continue to suggest tweaks.

The point was, let's prioritize and do what matters most first.

Just it's kind of what I've been preaching the whole time.

Like let's, in your area, wherever that is, do what matters first.

Don't try to do it all at once.

We're going to have to work our way through.

That was the point.

Yeah.

And I don't know if this is a follow-up issue in the way you described it.

It doesn't seem controversial, but I will say there was a big discussion and a recent initiative from Sid and other leaders that we should heavily prioritize dogfooding because there are parts, there are teams within the company that were not utilizing our features.

And we wanted to make sure that the product team was responsive to requests from them.

It's a little bit different than saying it's about our internal opinion.

Like we had always said we should validate it.

So that clarification is good that we want to make sure it's about us saying this is in line with where we want to take the product and where we're hearing customers.

But if an internal customer wants it, we should, the original thinking was that we should emphasize it.

I just want to like, if the intent was to make sure we were just clarifying that same position, but if we're saying actually we should kind of pull back from the push for more dogfooding.

No, I would, please don't conflate the two.

We very much still want to dogfood.

I think the point is when you're thinking of customers for your thing, think of our internal teams early, like you can get great feedback from them.

They have an incentive to work with you.

There's very little risk in rolling out things early to them.

So treat them like a customer and think of our internal teams early as you're rolling something out.

That's still very much the message.

But let's not over rotate on internal feedback or internal opinion.

Let's still seek external feedback too, because that's just one customer of many. Great.

Make sense?

Yeah, it does.

All right. 2C, customer discovery training coming soon.

Sarah O'Donnell and her team are going to do a bunch of sort of quick videos on a variety of customer discovery topics.

So super excited for that.

They should start dropping any day now, I think starting this week.

And so we'll release those to you as they come out.

We'll embed them in the how we work description on our team page as well.

All right.

Number three, 12.2, kickoff feedback.

Josh, thanks for leading the charge.

I thought you did a good job of emceeing and sort of adding color commentary in between.

I thought the screenshots definitely helped.

There were a bunch that did not have them.

I was wondering why.

Is it just because we're not there yet on many of these?

Yeah? Yeah.

I mean, some of the commentary, I don't know, or Nicole added that, yeah, many of the issues were saying we're going to do UX front end and back end in the same iteration.

So it hasn't started.

And in some, they're like, I can think of a number where there just aren't appropriate screenshots, or at least there weren't screenshots or mock-ups created in advance for the purposes of front end working on it, because front end was going to work on it without a mock-up.

Okay.

I'd love to get to where we're a bit ahead so that we'll have more of these earlier and hopefully the customer discovery flow will get us further ahead on that.

In my case, some of the features also just have no UX component, as in no UI component that could be screen-shotted.

Understood.

Yeah.

I don't expect everyone.

I mean, use your judgment.

If it doesn't need it, fine.

But where we do need design, it'd be great to get at least a month ahead so as we roll into dev, we have that to offer them.

Scott, just a quick question to you.

How do you feel about presenting like balsamic or super lo-fi mock-ups on the kickoff call?

Fine with that.

Okay.

Because that could be an option, too, for PMs that are waiting for UX to work in the same sprint.

And I know that plan's done a pretty good job, at least in the past, of kind of running ahead of UX and saying, like, hey, this is kind of what I think I want this to look like before spinning UX cycles on making a more hi-fi mock-up.

So just to- If you think it does a better job of describing it than the issue itself, then use it.

I think in some cases, like a picture can be worth a thousand words.

I mean, no matter how many words you throw at something, it's like, you know, for example, one of my things that I request or I reported on for the release, the kickoff meeting, was expanding the Epic view in the roadmap.

And like, those are basically just a bunch of buzzwords put together that you're like, okay, what does that mean?

Expand Epic.

And I'm just- I literally thought on that one for like 20 minutes saying, how do I make this issue title like more descriptive for customer value?

And it just came down to like, that is the functionality we're adding.

What does that mean?

Oh, here's the screenshot.

You can see that we're going to add a dropdown.

You can see the issues and children epics that are attached to that epic.

And in that case, I was like, I'm so thankful I have a screenshot, even though that one is actually not a hi-fi mock-up.

It's more lo-fi.

It was a little bit pieced together.

So yeah, I think like in general, there's a lot more value if we can show something like that.

So product managers, you can consider that.

You should feel free that, you know, you're empowered to take a tool that you're comfortable with.

Even if it might even be just like Google Slides and make something that gets you at least a part of the way there in terms of what you want the experience to look like.

Yep.

Perfect. 3C, I thought the talk track shifted.

It was definitely more problem focused.

I noticed a number of speakers really trying to zero in on that, which is perfect.

Some of them could have been more problem focused, I thought.

So just keep considering that as you, you know, it's important to be able to pitch these things in ways that people that aren't close to it can understand.

And so just think about that.

How do I explain this to someone who's cold, who doesn't know a darn thing about this?

Why should they care?

Getting that crystal in your thinking is going to be important no matter what.

So it's time well spent.

Hey, Scott, this is Karina, just to add to that, if you don't mind.

I think this has always been a challenge in product, even before I've joined GitLab, for many people is how to get there on some of this terminology when those of us have deep technical background.