[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":790},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/how-the-ceo-shadow-program-boosted-my-individual-productivity-during-the-covid-19-crisis":3,"navigation-en-us":34,"banner-en-us":434,"footer-en-us":444,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Brittany Rohde":686,"blog-related-posts-en-us-how-the-ceo-shadow-program-boosted-my-individual-productivity-during-the-covid-19-crisis":700,"assessment-promotions-en-us":741,"next-steps-en-us":780},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":22,"isFeatured":12,"meta":23,"navigation":24,"path":25,"publishedDate":20,"seo":26,"stem":31,"tagSlugs":32,"__hash__":33},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/how-the-ceo-shadow-program-boosted-my-individual-productivity-during-the-covid-19-crisis.yml","How The Ceo Shadow Program Boosted My Individual Productivity During The Covid 19 Crisis",[7],"brittany-rohde",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"how-the-ceo-shadow-program-boosted-my-individual-productivity-during-the-covid-19-crisis",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9},"How the CEO Shadow Program boosted my individual productivity during the COVID-19 Crisis","How the CEO Shadow Program boosted my individual productivity during the COVID-19 crisis",[18],"Brittany Rohde","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","2020-05-29","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\n\nIn late January/early February I was fortunate enough to become a part of the CEO Shadow Program at GitLab. Having been at GitLab for three and a half years, I have been exposed to an organization scaling at an amazing rate in our all remote setting. Aside from [Contribute](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/summit/), this program would be the first time I would work from an office while at the company, which was nerve wracking and exciting.\n\nIn addition to being nervous about going into an office daily to work in person with the CEO and the co-shadow after working from home only for nearly four years, I was also grappling with the idea of being apart from my one year old daughter. Thankfully, I am originally from Northern California and with the support from the CEO Shadow Planning team, I was able to coordinate a schedule with my family where I could work from San Francisco during the week and spend the weekend in between with my daughter.\n\nI did not expect how much I would take away from this two week intensive program, and how immediately impactful it would become on my life.\n\n## What did I take away:\n\n* Iteration when working towards the minimum viable change can be an effective value, especially in the non-engineering groups where long term projects are more normal compared to an agile workflow.\n* Speak up. My contributions were more than welcome whenever I was shadowing in a call, work dinner meeting, or just chatting with Sid, our CEO. A different perspective cannot be heard if it is not shared.\n* Don’t waste anyone’s time since in a remote setting you are also wasting your own time. This is especially important in meetings. If you are asking yourself, what is the purpose of this meeting, don’t take the time to have it.\n* Instead, work asynchronously as much as possible so there is more time for what you choose to do in your day. For example, instead of a status update meeting you could have a coffee chat with someone that you may never otherwise interact with.\n* Learn something from every conversation. If you didn’t learn something from a call, ask questions until you do.\n\n## Impact of the Takeaways\n\nOnce I returned to my home office, I became extremely excited to take these learnings along with many others I had gathered throughout my time with Sid, Suzie the cat, and the co-shadows. Little did I know that within a month the world would be entering the COVID-19 crisis and the change that would occur in the workplace.\n\nAs GitLab was already a remote only company, my initial thought was that my daily routine would not change much. It was not until my daughter’s school closed that I started to see the potential impact on my personal productivity. The first few weeks were challenging to navigate my workload, my daughter’s schedule, our two dogs, and my significant other (who was still required to physically go to work). I was not sure what I should do when or if I was doing enough in any category of my life. Is my daughter watching too much tv? Should I work a couple hours this evening to round out my work day? It wasn’t until I let go of expectations and gave myself a break that I was able to just do small things at a time to try to climb the hills in front of me each day.\n\nOn the work front, I set a new schedule for myself where I would have blocks in the day to focus only on my family. On the personal side, I would try to incorporate my daughter into everyday chores so I could keep up with the endless amount of laundry that seemed to be piling up at home. Over time, we have gotten into a rhythm that works for us with some days being harder than others.\n\nTo my surprise, I looked at my productivity levels after a couple weeks and it hadn’t changed much overall. I have felt pulled and scattered, but my output was staying relatively constant. When I reflect on why, it is because I have instinctually started applying the learnings from my time as a CEO shadow to my everyday work.\n\nSince I may only have 20 minutes here or there to work instead of the set blocks of time I was used to in the past, I focus on the smallest possible output and document for myself where I left off. This has increased my contributions to issues and docs where someone else can easily jump in resulting in a multitude of minimum viable changes. Instead of shying away or being embarrassed by my toddler running around or chatting (even sometimes screaming) in a call, I just introduce her to everyone and incorporate her into the conversation when I do speak up. It is amazing how gracefully my colleagues, both internally at GitLab as well as vendors externally, have reacted to making sure I did not feel less than for her presence.\n\nI am also in less meetings. Since my calendar is blocked over for more time throughout the day, I am noticing an uptick in async first, then hop on a call if we can’t sort through an item via an issue or slack. And lastly, if I feel as though my attendance in a meeting is not necessary, I decline. Right now, every productive minute of my time is worth double to me than it was before because it means I am even less present with my family.\n\nThe main piece of this shelter in place I will remember is that I am learning so much from my peers at GitLab. We are learning more and more about each other’s daily lives, how to cope, how to support, and how to uplift one another throughout this historic time. While our new normals may be chaotic, stressful, and uncertain, there has become a sense of belonging in that we are all just trying to figure out how to move from one day to the next.\n\nThe timing of the CEO shadow program was impeccable for me in that it not only reminded me of why I joined GitLab, but also why I have stayed. The takeaways of this program have helped shape the way I do my daily work so that I can cope in a time of great uncertainty. For anyone at GitLab uncertain of whether or not to participate, I highly encourage you to make a merge request and sign up for a slot. I guarantee you will learn so much about the company or yourself that can help you at any point in your career.\n\nCover image credit:\n\nCover image by [Tine Ivanic](https://unsplash.com/photos/u2d0BPZFXOY) on [Unsplash](https://www.unsplash.com)\n","yml",{},true,"/en-us/blog/how-the-ceo-shadow-program-boosted-my-individual-productivity-during-the-covid-19-crisis",{"title":27,"description":16,"ogTitle":27,"ogDescription":16,"noIndex":12,"ogImage":19,"ogUrl":28,"ogSiteName":29,"ogType":30,"canonicalUrls":28},"How the CEO Shadow Program improved my pandemic 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statement",{"items":676},[677,680,683],{"text":678,"config":679},"Terms",{"href":504,"dataGaName":505,"dataGaLocation":452},{"text":681,"config":682},"Cookies",{"dataGaName":514,"dataGaLocation":452,"id":515,"isOneTrustButton":24},{"text":684,"config":685},"Privacy",{"href":509,"dataGaName":510,"dataGaLocation":452},[687],{"id":688,"title":18,"body":8,"config":689,"content":691,"description":8,"extension":22,"meta":695,"navigation":24,"path":696,"seo":697,"stem":698,"__hash__":699},"blogAuthors/en-us/blog/authors/brittany-rohde.yml",{"template":690},"BlogAuthor",{"name":18,"config":692},{"headshot":693,"ctfId":694},"","brittanyr",{},"/en-us/blog/authors/brittany-rohde",{},"en-us/blog/authors/brittany-rohde","c4riXbXs2YV1Z86PMLyzIkro0O9Ag_0KE4i2qfZUP7w",[701,711,726],{"content":702,"config":709},{"title":703,"description":704,"authors":705,"heroImage":19,"date":707,"body":708,"category":9},"CEO Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[706],"Jacie Bandur","2021-05-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\nHi! I’m Jacie Bandur. I completed GitLab’s CEO Shadow program from 2021-04-26 through 2021-05-07. It was a really enlightening experience. I generally work in Learning and Development and consider myself a lifelong learner. I can’t even explain how much I learned in such a short about of time. I learned a lot about the business. I learned a lot about the product. But learned even more about the importance of iteration in everything we do.\n\n### Qualifications to Participate\n\nI wanted to start this off with touching on qualifications to participate in the program.\n\nI am the type of person that has gone through most of my life thinking I’m not qualified for things. I’m not qualified for that job, that promotion, that program. The list goes on and on.\n\nWhen I saw the [CEO Shadow program](/blog/ceo-shadow-impressions-takeaways/) kick off in 2019, I really wanted to participate. I was a little intimidated. Who wouldn’t be, spending 2 weeks with the CEO of any company? But time passed and all the sudden it was 2021 and I had not taken any steps to participating in the program.\n\nIf you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that you are qualified to participate in this program, I’m not big on giving “pep talks,” but here’s me telling you - You are qualified for this program. There’s never going to be a good or perfect time to do it. Tell your manager you want to do the CEO Shadow program. Stop waiting. Sign up today.\n\nNote: Take a look at the [eligibility](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/#eligibility) section of the CEO Shadow page for more information on signing up.\n\n### Pre-Program Tips\n\nThere are many things recommended for shadows to do pre-program outlined on the CEO Shadow handbook page. As I was going through the program there were things that I thought helped me (or would have helped me).\n\nHere are my top 6 recommendations:\n\n1. Make sure your team knows you will be unavailable for 2 weeks. This isn’t a program that can or should be done alongside your normal day to day work. I found catching up from the 2 weeks away kind of difficult because I was trying to keep up on what was going on and I had a bunch of half done things.\n1. Talk with people who have done the shadow program - schedule at least 3 coffee chats with CEO Shadow Alumni.\n1. Have food that is easy to eat quickly. Sid’s meetings are back to back most days, so you will have small amounts of time to eat throughout the day. Sid does eat during calls, which you are welcome to do, too, but if you are taking notes, it is difficult to eat. And this will make you realize why speedy meetings are so important!\n1. Listen to the [Executive Leadership LinkedIn Learning course](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/executive-leadership/).\n1. Be prepared to ask questions. When doing the program virtually, there isn’t a ton of time for asking questions, so when one would come up, I would add it to a note on my computer and ask if there was ever time with just the shadows and Sid.\n1. Take at least 1 day off after the program. Take even a couple of days off if you can! This is recommended on the handbook page, but I can’t stress this enough.\n\n\n### Takeaways\n\n**Group Conversations**\n\nI’ve been at GitLab for almost 4 years. When I joined, I made it a point to attend as many GC’s as I could. I had gotten out of the habit of attending Group Conversations. After attending them again for 2 weeks, I realized how important they are to understand better what is going on across the business. Everything in the organization is so intertwined. It’s helpful to understand what other teams are working on and succeeding in.\n\n**Feedback**\n\nWe should all be giving and receiving feedback often. We have a whole [handbook page on giving and receiving feedback](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/guidance-on-feedback/). Read the handbook page and watch the videos, as well. Practice giving feedback. I recommend using the [1-1 agenda](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format/) Sid uses, because Feedback is an essential piece of that agenda, and it makes feedback more of a routine thing.\n\n**Biggest Takeaway**\n\nWe have an incredible team here at GitLab, from Engineering to Product to Sales to People and all the groups in between. There are so many great ideas. I observed the constant reinforcement by Sid to start with something small and build on it. You can ALWAYS make something more complex. It’s hard to go back to something more simple when you start with something complex.\n\nA couple of quotes that I heard from Sid during the program that reinforced this point:\n\n- “Every complex system evolves from a simple system that worked.”\n- “It’s very clear what is the simple solution. We can always make it more complicated as we go on.”\n\nI know they are very similar, but they happened in different meetings on different days, so the point was reinforced repeatedly.\n\nDuring the program, I reflected on the projects that I’am working on. How many of them am I trying to do too much on before releasing. Probably all of them. When I’m working on projects in the future, I will break them down into smaller, more doable chunks. Iteration is hard - it’s a skill to be practicing constantly.\n\n\n### Overall\n\nOverall, the program was really insightful and impactful. If you haven’t participated in it yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so!\n",{"slug":710,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":712,"config":724},{"title":713,"description":714,"authors":715,"heroImage":717,"date":718,"body":719,"category":9,"tags":720},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[716],"Austin Regnery","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679501/Blog/Hero%20Images/new-feature.png","2021-05-11","It was mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, and I had 10 minutes in between meetings. So I decided to try and solve a pain point of mine.\nYou see, I had to memorize this HTML snippet to create a collapsible section in GitLab Issue descriptions and comments, but I kept forgetting it. Was it `summary` or `section`? I could never remember.\n```html\n\u003Cdetails>\n\u003Csummary>Insert Title\u003C/summary>\nHidden content\n\u003C/details>\n```\nEven though it is not vanilla Markdown, GitLab knows how to interpret some HTML. I used this formatting trick fairly often since full-page screenshots can occupy a lot of screen space, which leads to excessive scrolling.\nSo I decided to poke around our codebase to see how the other Markdown shortcuts worked. To my surprise, it was pretty straightforward. Each shortcut had a simple text input that mapped to each button. This implementation was simple to replicate since I just needed to copy/paste and replace a few words.\n![Image of Vue and Haml files with editor shortcuts](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/vue-haml.png){: .shadow}\nThe Vue and Haml files with the new shortcut\n\nI started a branch and began hacking away at the code. Now, I would never call myself a Software Engineer, but I like to try and make things from time to time. I was able to add a new shortcut to the toolbar to insert this code snippet for me in less than 10 minutes. No more memorizing! Making contributions like this is what makes working at GitLab so special.\nNow, it wasn't ready for production, but I at least had something that worked. I shared it with my UX colleagues in Slack, and it started to gain traction with several up-votes and few constructive comments on how to make it better.\nWith the functionality flushed out, a few other designers helped me get a better icon added to our SVG library. Using clear iconography is critical for communicating information more clearly.\n| Initial Icon | Final Icon |\n| - | - |\n| ![SVG of chevron right icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/chevron-right.svg) | ![SVG of details block icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/details-block.svg) |\n\nThe last thing to do was resolve my failing tests, and I had several teammates help me do that.\n![Gif of the shortcut being used](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/demo.gif)\n\nToday [this change](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/54938) merged! Now I solved a pain point for me and others. It took a few months to go from idea to production, but the effort was super low. I'd say the return on my initial investment, 10 minutes, is super high.\n> Having a direct impact on a product was never an option for me before joining GitLab.\n\n![Image of participants in the Merge Request](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/participants.png)\n\n\nThank you to everyone that helped me deploy this\n",[721,722,723],"UX","product","AWS",{"slug":725,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":727,"config":739},{"title":728,"description":729,"authors":730,"heroImage":732,"date":718,"body":733,"category":9,"tags":734},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[731],"Sam Beckham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679507/Blog/Hero%20Images/ci-cd.png","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHave you ever pressed the close door button on the elevator, in the hope that you'll save a few precious seconds?\nOr got frustrated at the person stood next to you at the cross-walk, neglecting to press the button?\nWell, maybe they know something you don't, or perhaps you know this already.\nMany buttons in our society lie to us.\n[David McRaney](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/10/placebo-buttons/) dubbed these, \"Placebo buttons\" and they're everywhere.\nThose elevator doors won't close any faster and the cross-walk button has no effect on the lights.\nThe only lights they control are the lights on the buttons themselves.\nThey give you the feedback you crave, but that's all they're doing.\n\nThese placebos aren't constrained to the physical world, they're prevalent in [UI design](/blog/the-evolution-of-ux-at-gitlab/) too.\nFrom literal placebo buttons like [YouTube's downvote](https://www.quora.com/Does-downvoting-a-comment-on-YouTube-even-do-anything), to more subtle effects like Instagram always [pretending to work](https://www.fastcompany.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed), or progress bars that have a [fixed animation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/).\nThey're everywhere if you know where to look.\n\nAt GitLab, we created a placebo of our own in one of our core features; the pipeline graph.\n\nThose of you who have used our pipeline graph, will be familiar with its appearance.\nThere's a series of jobs, grouped by stages, connected by a series of lines depicting the relationships between the jobs.\nBut these lines might be lying to you.\nThese lines are indiscriminately drawn between each job in a stage, regardless of their relationship.\nThese lines are placebos.\n\n![The old pipeline rendering with lines connecting every job in a stage](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_old-graph.png)\n\nThis wasn't a problem to begin with.\nA basic pipeline has several jobs across a handful of stages.\nJobs in each stage would run parallel to each other, but each stage would run sequentially.\nIn the image shown above, all the jobs in the test stage would trigger at the same time. Once those jobs had finished, all the jobs in the build stage would trigger.\nWe used rudimentary CSS to draw lines connecting each job in one stage to each job in the next.\nThese lines weren't calculated based on their connections, but still reflected the story they were telling.\n\nSince the introduction of `needs` relationships in [v12.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/47063), pipelines got a bit more complicated.\nNow you could configure a job in a later stage to trigger as soon as a job in an earlier stage completed.\nLooking at our old example, we could set the API deployment to run as soon as our spec tests passed.\nThis skips the remaining tests and the entire build stage, turning our lines into pretty little liars.\n\nWe had many internal discussions about these lines, and how to show the relationships between jobs.\nThere's the [`needs` visualization](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/#needs-visualization), which does an excellent job of displaying these relationships, but the main pipeline graph was still inaccurate.\nFor the past few months, we've been [refactoring the pipeline graph](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/276949), giving it a new lease of life and fixing some of its issues along the way.\nOne of those issues were the faked lines.\nIn the new version, we can accurately draw lines between jobs.\nLines that actually depict the relationships jobs have with each other.\nNow the lines no-longer lie!\n\n![The newer pipeline graph showing the correct needs links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_new-graph.png)\n\nThe above image shows an unreleased version of the pipeline graph.\nYou can see the lines drawn between the jobs to show that the `deploy:API` job can start as soon as the `rspec` job is successful.\nSomething the old lines (shown earlier in this post) would have been unable to depict.\n\nOne unfortunate downside of this is that these lines can be quite expensive to calculate.\nThey're actual DOM nodes, drawn deliberately and placed precisely.\nOn smaller graphs this isn't a problem, but some of our initial tests have found pipelines with a potential 8000+ job connections.\nThat kind of calculation would grind the browser to a halt, and nobody wants that.\n\nAt GitLab, we believe in boring solutions.\nWe make the simple change that sets us on the path towards where we want to be.\nShip it, get feedback, and iterate.\nSo that's what we did.\nIn the first phase of this rollout, we shipped the new pipeline graph with no lines connecting the jobs.\nWe don't have to worry about the expensive calculations, and we still get to roll out the refactored pipeline graph.\n\n![The current (v13.11) pipeline graph showing no links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_current-graph.png)\n\nWe know some of you will miss them, but fear not.\nBoring solutions are just technical debt if you don't iterate on them.\nSo the [improved lines are coming](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4509) in a future release, along with several other improvements to the pipeline graph.\nWe're already starting to roll out the new [Job Dependencies](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/298973) view which shows the jobs in a (much closer to) execution order.\nStay tuned for more updates, and watch [Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EKqKjB7OQ) for the technical side of this effort and a deeper dive into some of the decisions we made.\n",[735,736,737,738],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":740,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":742},[743,757,768],{"id":744,"categories":745,"header":747,"text":748,"button":749,"image":754},"ai-modernization",[746],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":750,"config":751},"Get your AI maturity 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