The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You guys share so many of the things that most people keep secret. You post videos of your team meetings on YouTube.

**David DeSanto** (0:05)
We get people who then contribute because of what they see. Oh, I can go build that, I know what that is. Hey, I ran that same problem too, I'd love to hear how you solved it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:13)
You also have this handbook, how you onboard people, how count payables works at GitLab.

**David DeSanto** (0:18)
We'll have companies who will fork the handbook. If you can leverage what GitLab has done, that's amazing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
You mentioned the value of short toes, which I was definitely gonna ask about.

**David DeSanto** (0:27)
That's where if you have long toes, you feel like people are stepping on you, whereas if you had short toes, it's about the work, it's not about you. You end up with a lot less of the negative headbutting, especially in an asynchronous culture like GitLab.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:38)
Is there any tips you could share with PMs that are just struggling in a remote world?

**David DeSanto** (0:42)
If everyone's really annoyed at you, you're probably actually doing your job well.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:49)
Today, my guest is David DeSanto. David is the Chief Product Officer at GitLab, which is an incredibly unique company. It's the largest remote-only company in the world. They share many of their team meetings on YouTube. And they've grown from being just a source code management business competing with GitHub to a multi-product platform that covers security, compliance, continuous integration, project management, deploy tools and more. Many of which are infused with AI magic. In our conversation, we dig into GitLab's culture of transparency, including how they operationalize it, what they share publicly versus what they don't. The surprising benefits of working this way and why it's worth considering going transparent with your organization. Also, we explore some of GitLab's other unicultural values like kindness and having short toes.
Plus, David shares a bunch of great advice for scaling remote work based on what's worked well at GitLab over the years. Also, when it makes sense to go breadth over depth versus depth over breadth when launching new product lines and how it worked for GitLab over the years. This was a fascinating conversation. And if you want to learn more about a company that's doing things very differently while also kicking a lot of ass, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you David DeSanto after a short word from our sponsors.
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David, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.