(highlight:: GitLab's 4 Principles for Any Remote Organization
Key takeaways:
• Creating a shared reality for your team members entails having a single source of truth, situational leadership, and shared values.
• Allowing everyone to contribute entails reducing the scope of things, iteration, and getting things out faster.
• Decision velocity entails making decisions faster, giving agency, and having a bias for action.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So team ops kind of is a bundle of four big principles that we discovered and we think are useful for other companies, whether they work remote or not. What is team ops? Can you talk through the four principles? Yeah, so the first one is creating a shared reality for your team members. And that entails things as having a single source of truth, like being really diligent about not duplicating information. It is about situational leadership and varying your management style. And it's about having shared values. The second principle is to allow everyone to contribute. We do that through things like iteration, reducing the scope of things and getting them out faster. Everybody's allowing other people to give suggestions of what you should do in your role. But without the necessity to take them, I think you're able to combine the best of the speed of hierarchical organizations and the information that flows in consensus organizations. You always allow people to bring suggestions, but never require the recipient of them to acknowledge them or argue with them. So you don't have to defend your decisions because if you would require that, things start flying under the radar. The third principle is decision velocity, like making decisions faster, giving agency, having a bias for action to explain your reasoning to work asynchronous when you can. Be transparent in how not just how you measure, but what the measurements are for all the different parts of the company to the extent you can, and making sure that people always kind Of work with the same other people to the extent that you can.)
- Time 0:26:43
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(highlight:: GitLab Meeting Tips: Have an Agenda, Evolve Agenda into Notes, Don't Present, Working on Other Things is Okay
Key takeaways:
• GitLab always prepares meetings with an agenda, and notes the discussion as it goes along.
• It is encouraged to have a presentation, and to record a video of it beforeh.
• It is okay to say that you were not paying attention, and to repeat the question.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
One thing we do at GitLab is always prepare meetings. Always have an agenda front. The second thing is to evolve that agenda into the notes as the meeting goes. And I've seen so many companies where the agenda and the notes are different. I think that's ridiculous. The agenda is kind of what you're going to discuss. And then you fill out what you discussed as you go along. When you want to ask a question, you typically put your name in the kind of the agenda that's becoming the notes as a kind of a placeholder and preferably with the question you're going To ask. What we never do in meetings is present in meetings. A meeting is very expensive in the sense that you need to bring everyone together at the same time. It is hard, especially if you work across time zones. GitLab has people in over 60 countries, so that is sometimes very tough. So it is encouraged to have a presentation. And you can send that to people in advance. Typically you also link it from the agenda. You link the agenda from the meeting invite. If you want to present, that's also encouraged. You record a video beforehand. Then another thing that you alluded to is that we think it will be spectacular coincidence if 100% of a meeting is interesting to you. Probably not 100% is relevant to you. And it's totally cool to do your email on the side, to do whatever you want on the side. And it's okay to say, oh, sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Can you repeat the question? That is not a problem. It's almost a badge of honor. You're apparently a good manager of your own time.)
- Time 0:29:41
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