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Importance of Performant, Reliable and Secure GitLab to our business

The importance of performant, reliable and secure GitLab to the business

If all businesses are software businesses, then software downtime is business downtime.

Our customers pick GitLab because, like us, they believe that all businesses are now software businesses. Our bank is an app or a website, not a place we drive to. Our grocery store is an app or a website and doesn’t have to be a place we visit. Our customers are increasingly relying on GitLab to be the central nervous system of their software system and therefore GitLab is increasingly mission critical to their business success. Consequently, a downtime or unacceptable performance of GitLab can come in the way of their business - increasing their cycle time and reducing their ability to compete.

Incidentally, one of our value propositions for Ultimate tier is to moving Security left. Move left because it is more expensive to find problems later in the cycle.

We need to walk the talk and adopt a shift left mindset so that we find and fix reliability, security and performance problems before our customers experience them

Every time we find a reliability, security or performance problem in SaaS it has several negative effects.

  • Our customers suffer.
  • We become inefficient as problems found and fixed in dev stage cost much less in terms of hours and $ than those found in production.
  • We erode our customers trust that can lead to lengthened sales cycles, and reluctance to adopt new capabilities that we create. That can further erode our competitive advantage and reduce our ability to be a strategic partner.

Building reliable, secure and performant software doesn’t mean that it has to take longer time.

It requires us to embrace “systems thinking” and improve our culture, process, automation and tools to help all of us get better at it.

It can be a virtuous loop

  • Customers are happier and more confident in our ability to deliver. This leads to better relationships including more word-of-mouth growth, internal advocacy and more adoption.

  • Sales and Marketing has shorter sales cycle and more efficient sales process. We are able to hold our prices and expand with confidence.

  • With predictable prices, our margins stay healthy. With healthy margins our Finance team is able to project our cost and profit more predictably. This helps with creating confidence with our investors and that can help us raise money at favorable terms to reinvest in the business. If we are a public company, it also translates into a more predictable stock price.

  • R&D team members have a high quality of life. We attract talent. We are more predictable. We don’t have to react to too many escalations and that helps teams focus on the future. Reduced firefights lead to better quality of life for everyone involved. Reduced firefights and escalations means less top-down involvement and more autonomy. The converse is also true. Less reliable code, more firefights, more escalations and more top-down involvement will lead to lower morale and talent attrition.

Ultimately if we want GitLab to help others build better software, we need to lead from the front.

Edited by Adam Cohen