[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":795},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/small-experiments-significant-results-and-learnings":3,"navigation-en-us":39,"banner-en-us":439,"footer-en-us":449,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Matej Latin":691,"blog-related-posts-en-us-small-experiments-significant-results-and-learnings":705,"assessment-promotions-en-us":746,"next-steps-en-us":785},{"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__":38},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/small-experiments-significant-results-and-learnings.yml","Small Experiments Significant Results And Learnings",[7],"matej-latin",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"small-experiments-significant-results-and-learnings",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Small experiments, significant results and learnings","How our Growth team validates design solutions with the smallest experiments possible",[18],"Matej Latin","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749666775/Blog/Hero%20Images/cover.jpg","2021-04-07","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nA while ago, I worked closely with the Growth:Expansion team on improving the experience of inviting users to GitLab. I first went through the existing experience of a user that’s inviting their team to GitLab and found a few opportunities for improvements. The work could have ended there, but I felt uneasy about it in the days after completing it. I felt that there was more to it, so I dug in again. This time, I wanted to explore what the experience was across many users involved in the process, instead of just the inviting user.\n\n## Multi-user journey map\n\nSo instead of mapping out a single-user journey map, I mapped out the journey as it was then for all the users involved. I came up with the following:\n\n![Multi-user journey map](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/small-experiments/multi-user-journey.png)\n\nTake a look at the [multi-user journey map on Mural](https://app.mural.co/t/gitlab2474/m/gitlab2474/1588920686905/a2982098783c967cee6f7e656fffe574dec0777b).\n\nI wanted to see what it was like for non-admin users to invite their team to GitLab or assign some work to them (not all managers and leads are admin users). So a non-admin user wants to assign an issue to a team member that isn’t on GitLab yet. There are three users involved: the non-admin user trying to assign some work, the admin user who is the only one who can invite new users and the user that is being invited.\nThe main conclusion of this multi-user journey map? There are many interruptions and a lot of waiting time between the steps. Such a simple task as assigning an issue to a team member can span across days because of these interruptions.\n\nThe other conclusion of this work was that it was hard to find out how to invite users to GitLab, especially for new teams trying to adopt GitLab.\n\nSo we came up with a problem to solve:\n\n> Can we make it easier for new teams to invite their team members?\n\nand a question to answer:\n\n> Would non-admin users request invitations to their team members if they could?\n\n## Making it easier for new teams to invite their team members\nWe started with the smaller problem as it was a great candidate to do a MVC (minimal viable change) experiment and learn a lot from it. The concept of the solution was simple: increase the discoverability of the *invite members* feature. After some thought, I realized that the best place for this was the Assignee dropdown that we use on issues and merge requests. It’s at the top of the right sidebar, which means it’s quite prominent, but more importantly, it is a commonly used feature related to team management.\n\nSo we decided that the most minimal experiment we could do was to add the “Invite members” link to the bottom of that dropdown and link directly to the *Settings* → *Members* page of the project. That’s the page where admin users can invite new users.\n\n![Assignee dropdown](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/small-experiments/assignee-dropdown.png){: .small.center}\n\n[Here’s the prototype](https://www.sketch.com/s/e96544d1-f2c7-45d5-a968-23e63064432d/a/bD9885/play) of the experience we tested. After crunching the numbers of the experiment we saw the following results:\n\n- Only a 0.16% click-through rate on the “Invite members” link in the dropdown\n- But a 2% increase in namespaces with two or more users\nThis was significant because we only showed the new “Invite members” link to admin users. So the low click-through rate makes sense as the majority of users viewing the assignee are not admins and therefore did not see our test \"invite members\" option. However, even with a low click-through rate, the change in the metric that mattered most saw a 2% increase. Which is a considerable increase on its own! But we’re just getting started.\n\n## Do non-admin users want to invite their team members?\n\nNow we come to the question that we uncovered during the mapping of the multi-user journey. There’s a lot of waiting time and disruptions in the process of inviting a new user to GitLab. Especially when a non-admin user wants to do it. So we decided to run a similar experiment where we show the “Invite members” link in the assignee dropdown to non-admin users too.\nFollowing our MVC approach to conducting experiments, we wanted to run a minimal experiment that would help us answer this question. Instead of taking the time to build a complete experience for non-admin users requesting invitations from admin users, we decided to show a modal explaining that this feature isn’t available yet. We also added a link that would take the non-admin user to the *Settings* → *Members* page, where they can see who the admin is and contact them outside of GitLab (for now).\n\n![Modal not ready](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/small-experiments/modal-not-ready.png)\nIt’s not the ideal experience, but the potential for learning justified it. Plus, we only show an experiment like this to a fraction of our users. The experiment has only been running for a few weeks, so it’s too early for conclusions. But we’re seeing encouraging results already, some suggest even up to a 20% increase in namespaces with two or more users so yes, it seems that non-admin users do want to invite their team members.\n\n## Other improvements and follow-up experiments\nOne major improvement that our engineers have been working on is the “Invite members” modal. Instead of taking the user out of their workflow and into the *Settings* → *Members* page, they’ll be able to invite team members within their current workflow.\n\n![Modal invite form](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/small-experiments/modal-invite.jpg)\n\n[This is a prototype](https://www.sketch.com/s/e96544d1-f2c7-45d5-a968-23e63064432d/a/wmOa8m/play) of what the experience would be like with the invite modal.\n\n## Conclusion\n\nThese experiments are the first among many that we want to conduct. We’re also thinking about allowing non-admin users to request a free trial, activation of a feature, switching to a higher plan from their admin all while potentially giving the admin the ability to turn this functionality off and on as needed. The experiments we conducted so far are indicating that there’s a demand for non-admin users to be able to request things limited to admins. And most importantly, they were minimal experiments that led to significant results and great learnings.\n\nFor more details about these experiments check\n* [the original experiment design issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/217921)\n* [the follow-up experiment design issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/235979)\n* [the video recording of experiment and results discussion between me and Sam Awezec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5h_SNH3Nt8&ab_channel=GitLabUnfiltered) (the Product Manager of Growth:Expansion)\n\nPhoto by [Evgeni Tcherkasski](https://unsplash.com/@evgenit?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/small?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)\n",[23,24,25],"growth","inside 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statement",{"items":681},[682,685,688],{"text":683,"config":684},"Terms",{"href":509,"dataGaName":510,"dataGaLocation":457},{"text":686,"config":687},"Cookies",{"dataGaName":519,"dataGaLocation":457,"id":520,"isOneTrustButton":28},{"text":689,"config":690},"Privacy",{"href":514,"dataGaName":515,"dataGaLocation":457},[692],{"id":693,"title":18,"body":8,"config":694,"content":696,"description":8,"extension":26,"meta":700,"navigation":28,"path":701,"seo":702,"stem":703,"__hash__":704},"blogAuthors/en-us/blog/authors/matej-latin.yml",{"template":695},"BlogAuthor",{"name":18,"config":697},{"headshot":698,"ctfId":699},"","matejlatin",{},"/en-us/blog/authors/matej-latin",{},"en-us/blog/authors/matej-latin","U19HLsh0tqTRT_tDjZHONfKgfdmtiMQgzx0fKt9ySPU",[706,717,731],{"content":707,"config":715},{"title":708,"description":709,"authors":710,"heroImage":712,"date":713,"body":714,"category":9},"CEO Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[711],"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":716,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":718,"config":729},{"title":719,"description":720,"authors":721,"heroImage":723,"date":724,"body":725,"category":9,"tags":726},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[722],"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",[25,727,728],"product","AWS",{"slug":730,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":732,"config":744},{"title":733,"description":734,"authors":735,"heroImage":737,"date":724,"body":738,"category":9,"tags":739},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[736],"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",[740,741,742,743],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":745,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":747},[748,762,773],{"id":749,"categories":750,"header":752,"text":753,"button":754,"image":759},"ai-modernization",[751],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":755,"config":756},"Get your AI maturity 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