[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":793},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/optimizing-the-value-exchange-a-gentle-introduction":3,"navigation-en-us":37,"banner-en-us":437,"footer-en-us":447,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Gabe Weaver":689,"blog-related-posts-en-us-optimizing-the-value-exchange-a-gentle-introduction":703,"assessment-promotions-en-us":744,"next-steps-en-us":783},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":26,"isFeatured":12,"meta":27,"navigation":28,"path":29,"publishedDate":20,"seo":30,"stem":34,"tagSlugs":35,"__hash__":36},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/optimizing-the-value-exchange-a-gentle-introduction.yml","Optimizing The Value Exchange A Gentle Introduction",[7],"gabe-weaver",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"optimizing-the-value-exchange-a-gentle-introduction",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"How to optimize your value exchange system","Part one of a pragmatic, business-driven guide to help teams transition from fixating on output to optimizing the value exchange with their customers.",[18],"Gabe Weaver","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749672701/Blog/Hero%20Images/post-1-cover.jpg","2019-12-16","*Reading time: 8 minutes, 28 seconds*\n\n## The problem \n\nBuilding software products is **really** hard. Building an enduring company is even harder. We are constantly looking to [hire](https://www.christenseninstitute.org/jobs-to-be-done/) solutions to help us do this quickly and with as little risk as possible. Companies hire\nAgile ([R.I.P](https://pragdave.me/blog/time-to-kill-agile.html)) because they believe it will help them be more adaptable, increase productivity, and accelerate software delivery. They hire DevOps as a natural companion to increase speed, reduce defects, safely deploy code, and improve the resilience of infrastructures. \n\nWhile these solutions are directionally correct, we have a long way to go:\n\n- Software failures cost the U.S. economy over [$1t\nannually](https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2017/oct/30/glitch-economy-counting-cost-software-failures/).\n\n- Only 56% of startups [make it to their fourth\nyear](https://smallbiztrends.com/2019/03/startup-statistics-small-business.html).\n\n- [~40%](https://newproductsuccess.org/new-product-failure-rates-2013-jpim-30-pp-976-979/)\nof new products fail.\n\n- Only [6% of\nteams](https://www.stateofagile.com/#ufh-i-521251909-13th-annual-state-of-agile-report/473508)\nreport that Agile (long live agility) practices are enabling greater adaptability to changing market conditions.\n\nTo get better, we need to fundamentally shift the way we approach building software products and companies. Through a fictitious story about a company called Acme Co., I'm going to provide a pragmatic, business-driven approach of how we can get there. The first step is to change how we define success.\nWe need to move from **output to outcomes**. \n\n## The basics of the value exchange system\n\nI've worked with a lot of companies over the years. Most of them measure the success of product teams by how much they ship. In [Escaping The Build\nTrap](https://melissaperri.com/book), Melissa Perri correctly identifies the problem with this and the root cause -- companies misunderstand value. As she succinctly describes in her book:\n\n> Instead of associating value with the outcomes they want to create for\ntheir businesses and customers, they measure value by the number of things they produce. Let’s go back to the basics to determine what true value is.\nFundamentally, companies operate on a value exchange. \n\nShe uses a simple diagram to illustrate the value exchange system:\n\n\u003Cbr>\n\n![A Simplified Value Exchange System\nDiagram](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/optimizing-the-value-exchange/value-exchange-simple-diagram.png)\n\n\u003Cbr>\n\nCompanies build products to serve as vehicles for value delivery. When the customer's problems, needs, and wants are fulfilled, they provide value back to the business. Business value is easy to define, as it typically maps to achieving traditional objectives that are universal to all companies:\n\n- **Sustainable Value:** Support the product's core value and create\nbarriers to competition.\n\n- **Growth:** Grow market share, fulfill more demand, develop new markets,\nand improve recurring revenue.\n\n- **Profit:** Support higher prices, improve lifetime value, lower costs,\nand leverage existing assets.\n\nWhile these are easily measurable, customer value is often more intangible; making it difficult to define and correlate to business objectives. This leads companies to create proxies to represent value that are more straightforward to comprehend and measure -- such as things shipped.\n\nAs we discussed earlier, companies hire solutions like Agile (long live agility) and DevOps because they want to increase the speed and productivity of their value delivery system. The Value Exchange System is a [reinforcing loop](https://thesystemsthinker.com/reinforcing-and-balancing-loops-building-blocks-of-dynamic-systems/), so it naturally follows that if you increase the speed at which you deliver value, you will, therefore, increase the amount of value you capture from your customers. Companies are so fixated on optimizing for speed that a whole market of productivity analytics is emerging to track and report it.\nFor example, the hook on the landing page of a prominent tool on the market promises to help you \"measure your team's success\" by surfacing velocity data to see how fast your team is going. \n\nWhile speed and productivity are good things, optimizing for them in a silo will have a minimal overall impact on increasing the positive reinforcement to the system. This is because output does not necessarily result in outcomes. We need to optimize both how we deliver _and_ capture value. To better understand why, let's jump into an all so common dilemma Acme is currently trying to overcome.\n\n## Let's Meet Acme Co.\n\n> “Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions\nbased on the information they have. But they don’t have perfect information, especially about more distant parts of the system.” -- [Thinking In\nSystems](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557)\n\nAcme is a tech company that provides IoT devices and AI-driven insights to help logistics companies improve the efficiency of their operations. Acme has seen remarkable success over the last several years by leveraging a common growth strategy of steadily increasing investment in R&D, marketing, and selling to capture market share as quickly as possible. While not yet profitable, they believe there is an imminent inflection point where their investment in R&D will begin to pay off, resulting in revenue growth disproportionate to operating expenses. This has been playing out as expected, but the executive team is starting to get concerned given some financial trends over the last few quarters. \n\n\n| | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| Revenue | 36.7 | 44.0 | 48.4 | 50.9 |\n| COGS | 2.2 | 4.0 | 4.8 | 4.6 |\n| **Net Sales** | **34.5** | **40.1** | **43.6** | **46.3** |\n| *Margin* | *94%* | *91%* | *90%* | *91%* |\n| R&D | 16.5 | 18.3 | 20.3 | 22.7 |\n| Marketing | 4.1 | 5.2 | 6.6 | 7.4 |\n| Sales | 15.0 | 17.8 | 19.9 | 21.2 |\n| G&A | 1.6 | 2.1 | 2.3 | 2.9 |\n| **Total OpEx** | **37.2** | **43.4** | **49.1** | **54.2** |\n| **Net Profit** | **-2.7** | **-3.3** | **-5.5** | **-7.9** |\n| *Profit Margin* | *-7%* | *-8%* | *-11%* | *-16%* |\n\n\nAcme's board set a -20% acceptable risk threshold for the net profit margin.\nIt believes, that if necessary, it will be able to quickly reduce the deficit through strategic cost-cutting measures. It's clear from the financials that the company is on course to hit the threshold and the executives are scrambling to understand why. They have been easily converting customers from their competitors and are nowhere close to saturating their addressable market. They are investing heavily in delivering new product capabilities and scaling the sales organization to capture the value in return. The executive team decides to create a dedicated cross-functional working group to investigate and solve the problem. \n\n## Practicing kaizen with the improvement kata\n\nThe challenge before the working group is daunting. Acme is an incredibly complex system with hundreds of people and moving parts. They decide to adopt a management processes from the Toyota Product System developed by\nTaiichi Ohno. The group reviews what it means to practice continuous improvement - [kaizen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen) - by employing a technique called the Improvement Kata.\n\n![Diagram of the Improvement\nKata](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/optimizing-the-value-exchange/toyota-kata.png){:\n.center}\n\nThe first thing the group needs to decide is which direction to focus on first. If the challenge is to increase profits, that could be accomplished in a few different ways - increase the growth rate of revenue or decrease operating expenses. Looking at the financials, revenue growth has declined from an average of 20% per quarter to only 5% in the most recent. Given Acme has a sizeable market left to capture, and decreasing R&D spend at this point could hurt their long term growth targets, the group sets a target condition of getting revenue growth back to 10%. This feels like an obtainable goal within the quarter and will demonstrate forward progress to the executives.\n\nWith a target condition in hand, their next task is to identify the root cause of the decline in revenue growth and conduct experiments to reach their goal. They set out to connect with the sales team to begin their investigation. \n\n##  Why is revenue growth declining?\n\nAs the working group sits down with the sales team to review numbers, they use the [5 why's](https://medium.com/productmanagement101/learn-about-the-five-whys-technique-78283d75800f)\nto try to understand where things are going wrong:\n\n- **Why is revenue growth declining?** The sales team shares that conversion\nrates from new revenue are holding steady, but their conversion rates from up-sells have fallen dramatically.\n\n- **Why are up-sells declining?** According to the sales team, Acme is not\ndelivering capabilities fast enough that it had promised during the sales cycle.\n\n- **Why did the sales team set expectations for capabilities that weren't\nbuilt yet?** The sales team explained that enterprise customers have complex needs that aren't supported in Acme's core product capabilities yet. To keep up with sales quotas, they found that walking prospects through Acme's product roadmap usually gets the deal over the line. Based on the roadmap and the planned release dates, they had not seen this as a risk because things were expected to be delivered within the customer's acceptable time ranges. \n\n- **Why weren't things delivered within the customer's acceptable time\nrange?** In further discussions, the sales team reveals that they feel R&D is delivering new features at an increasingly slower rate quarter over quarter.\n\n- **Why is R&D slowing down on value delivery?** At first glance, R&D's\noutput metrics are consistent month-over-month relative to headcount. While the sales team helped the working group see that lost opportunities in up-sells were driving lower growth rates; it didn't make sense. The group decides to head over to R&D to better understand the value delivery system.\n\n## The importance of measuring the value delivery stream\n\nTo prepare for collaborating with the R&D team, the working group spends a few minutes reviewing the team's productivity metrics. To the surprise of the group, R&D only has one primary metric everyone on the team tracks consistently - the count of work items delivered. As the working group starts discussions with R&D, they explain that the executives set output objectives as a means of measuring the team's success. The rationale for this was due to the way the product is bundled and priced. The categories all roll up into one pricing model and it was difficult for the finance team to figure out a way to attribute revenue to the various categories. They had ultimately decided that measuring productivity was the next best thing.    \n\nSo if work item output is the goal and R&D's output has been consistent quarter over quarter, why was the sales team convinced R&D was slowing down on value delivery? To understand this, the working group needed to better understand the flow of items through the value delivery process within the\nValue Exchange System. To do this, they generated a simplified value stream map to visualize the stages a work item goes through as it is converted from requirements to a production feature.  \n\n\u003Cbr>\n\n![Acme's Value Stream\nMap](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/optimizing-the-value-exchange/d1.png){:\n.center}\n\n_Acme's Value Stream Map. Cycle Time = Time in queue + active time + time waiting once started_\n\nThe value stream map reveals that the total lead time for a work item is 2,132 hours (88 days). This is an astonishing revelation to the working group; especially since they didn't include the time a work item spends waiting between when a customer requests a feature and the team starts the planning process. Even though the R&D team delivered ~3,100 work items last month, it took well over three months to satisfy customer requests. The working group needs to collect more data, but they know they are on the right track. Before synthesizing a hypothesis, they finish collecting additional historical metrics to confirm their suspicions. \n\n| | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| Items Delivered | 2,275 | 2,524 | 2,800 | 3,131 |\n| Lead Time | 31 | 52 | 69 | 88 |\n| Cost Per Item Delivered | 7,250 | 7,250 | 7,250 | 7,250 |\n\n\nBased on the data, the working group notices the strong correlation between the increase in lead time and the decrease in up-sell revenue growth. Given their target condition for the upcoming quarter, they create the following hypothesis: \n\n> Decreasing the lead time by ~35% will enable customer requests to be\ncompleted 18 days earlier, resulting in a 5% increase in revenue growth\n\nWith a falsifiable hypothesis in hand, they shift their attention to figuring out the best approach for running an experiment. \n\nContinue reading:\n\n- Part 1: A Gentle(ish) Introduction\n\n- Part 2 (Next): [Reduce Waste To Increase Flow](/blog/optimizing-the-value-exchange-reduce-waste-to-increase-flow/)\n\n- Part 3: [The Compounding Value Of Shorter Feedback Loops](/blog/optimizing-the-value-exchange-the-compounding-value-of-shorter-feedback-loops/)\n\n  \n***Giving credit where it is due:** In [Escaping The Build Trap](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/escaping-the-build/9781491973783/ch01.html), Melissa Perri discusses the Value Exchange System at length and provides unparalleled wisdom for modern-day product managers. The Improvement Kata, Kanban, and Toyota Production System would not exist today if it weren't for Taiichi Ohno. His work has been foundational to many other systems and processes that have evolved over the years.* \nCover Photo by Cristina Gottardi on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/boxam4k4rQw)",[23,24,25],"agile","startups","workflow","yml",{},true,"/en-us/blog/optimizing-the-value-exchange-a-gentle-introduction",{"ogTitle":15,"ogImage":19,"ogDescription":16,"ogSiteName":31,"noIndex":12,"ogType":32,"ogUrl":33,"title":15,"canonicalUrls":33,"description":16},"https://about.gitlab.com","article","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/optimizing-the-value-exchange-a-gentle-introduction","en-us/blog/optimizing-the-value-exchange-a-gentle-introduction",[23,24,25],"qVOaDY_kkTaUbv5H8zdXwrOr1IhVqaZ2502lv2bRHoU",{"data":38},{"logo":39,"freeTrial":44,"sales":49,"login":54,"items":59,"search":367,"minimal":398,"duo":417,"pricingDeployment":427},{"config":40},{"href":41,"dataGaName":42,"dataGaLocation":43},"/","gitlab logo","header",{"text":45,"config":46},"Get free 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Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[709],"Jacie Bandur","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","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":714,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":716,"config":728},{"title":717,"description":718,"authors":719,"heroImage":721,"date":722,"body":723,"category":9,"tags":724},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[720],"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",[725,726,727],"UX","product","AWS",{"slug":729,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":731,"config":742},{"title":732,"description":733,"authors":734,"heroImage":736,"date":722,"body":737,"category":9,"tags":738},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[735],"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",[739,740,23,741],"CI","frontend","design",{"slug":743,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":745},[746,760,771],{"id":747,"categories":748,"header":750,"text":751,"button":752,"image":757},"ai-modernization",[749],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":753,"config":754},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":755,"dataGaName":756,"dataGaLocation":241},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":758},{"src":759},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":761,"categories":762,"header":763,"text":751,"button":764,"image":768},"devops-modernization",[726,557],"Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":765,"config":766},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":767,"dataGaName":756,"dataGaLocation":241},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":769},{"src":770},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":772,"categories":773,"header":775,"text":751,"button":776,"image":780},"security-modernization",[774],"security","Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":777,"config":778},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":779,"dataGaName":756,"dataGaLocation":241},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":781},{"src":782},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"header":784,"blurb":785,"button":786,"secondaryButton":791},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":787,"config":788},"Get your free trial",{"href":789,"dataGaName":48,"dataGaLocation":790},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":493,"config":792},{"href":52,"dataGaName":53,"dataGaLocation":790},1772652078246]