Alana Bellucci - First 100 Days

Welcome to GitLab and the ~"group::monitor" Alana!

We are so happy and excited that you decided to join us. You impressed us during the interview process. We believe that with your strong product management background, your collaborative and result-focused style, and your expertise in DevOps and the security space, you are going to help us make great progress in Monitor!

Starting a new job can be daunting. There will be things to learn, relationships to build, and adjustments to new ways of doing things. We want you to know that we've got your back! Take your time, ask questions, ask for help, say I don't know. Doing that is perfectly ok! Remember, you've already impressed us. You do not need to feel immediate pressure to "prove your worth" just as you are getting started.

This issue provides some guide rails on what you should focus on in your first 100ish days on the job. Please feel free to add/adjust/remove from it as you see fit.

First few weeks

Onboarding Tasks

Meet other people

Have a coffee chat with at least the PMs in the Ops Section

  • James Heimbuck
  • Darren Eastman - Runner
  • Dov Herskovitch - Pipeline Authoring
  • Viktor Nagy - Configure

Ask each person you meet to introduce you to someone else you should meet

Shadow your onboarding buddy (@jheimbuck_gl)

  • Understand how he spends his time, what he works on at different weeks during the milestone
  • Attend a few customer calls
  • Clickatell, Tuesday July 20th at 10:30 AM MST
  • Conversica, Wednesday, July 21st at 3 PM MST

Help with Monitoring activities

  • Don't feel like you need to be responsible, just be engaged and participate

Define specific goals you would like to accomplish in 14.2, 14.3 and 14.4

  • There are some suggestions, please add your own thoughts!

First Milestone 14.2

Actively participate in all Monitor activities

  • Be responsible for the planning issue in 14.3
  • Be responsible for release post items for 14.2
  • Actively ask for help
  • Actively plan for problem validation or solution validation

Understand Strengths and Weaknesses of your group's product

It is imperative to understand not only the fantastic new features of your group's product, but to also have a good understanding of the weakness and problems. Some suggested ways to achieve this understanding are:

  • Talk to your support stable counterparts
  • Schedule customer interviews with both existing customers, and new customers and pay attention to what needs are being met, what needs are not being met, and what barriers there are to entry.

Second Milestone 14.3

Complete a Validation track activity

Own the Monitor activities

  • You've done the entire process from start to finish once, do it once more with more ownership
  • It's ok to not know everything.
  • Ask for help often, it is a good practice no matter how experienced you are

Understand how your group's product stacks up to the competition

No matter how great our product is, there are strong competitors in the marketplace, and we should never discount their influence and innovation. In that regard, we should strive to understand what makes our competition better than us, and how we can best prioritize features to ensure we strategically compete. Some opportunities for this include:

  • Talk with analyst relations and product marketing stable counterparts
  • Create walkthroughs of competitive products and highlight our strengths and weaknesses observed through this exercise
    • Rootly
  • Build deep relationships with our internal teams so we can effectively facilitate the DogFooding of our product

Third Milestone 14.4

Feel comfortable running the day-to-day activities as the Monitor PM

Understand how your group's product fits within GitLab

It's easy to focus entirely on your own group when starting your PM journey at GitLab. However, one of our main competitive advantages is that we have a single application. Because of this, as a GitLab PM, we need to have a good understanding of adjacent pieces of our product in order to ensure we complement one another.

  • Collaborate with adjacent stage PMs
  • Spend time actually using different portions of the product to better understand where your group's contributions may fit in for additional cross-stage collaboration.
Edited by Alana Bellucci