Skip to content

APAC: Review of SGG membership Feb 2023

This was shared and discussed at the APAC team call on 21st February 2023. Preserving it here as an issue for broader visibility and reference.

End of 2022

Analysis of APAC SGGs late last year (Nov/Dec 2022) showed that we needed more people in Kapok, and more people in Western APAC to join Baobab as the next priorities while we were hiring.

February 2023 (FY24)

Now that the landscape has shifted a little, it was timely to revisit the previous analysis. I am always incredibly mindful of how disruptive group-membership changes can be and prefer to preserve existing connections and groups if at all possible. In discussion with all the APAC managers, we concluded that there was minimal benefit in adjusting group membership in APAC (and certainly not enough to introduce the disruption of shuffling people) - supported by the following observations:

  • Number of people per group: With 29 Support engineers spread across 5 groups, we are as balanced as we can be in terms of raw count of members - 4 groups have 6 members and 1 has 5.
  • Spread of seniors: this is something that AMER are looking at in their SGG reshuffle, but in APAC this is not really a concern - while we do have an imbalance of spread of seniors across our SGG, you all are really adept at working cross-group for expertise or just company (Crush Sessions and pairings for-the-win!).
  • Distribution of L&R/SM/SaaS contributions: this remains quite evenly distributed, with each group having from .5 to 1.25 of person-effort in L&R. (I do need to review this number based on more recent contributions than when this was last recorded, but am still confident it is balanced enough - and if it’s not, the better solution will be to support some people in doing less L&R and more other work and then load balancing among others rather than changing groups).
  • East-Central-West spread: This is also quite evenly spread - all groups have 3 or 4 people in East, and 2 or 3 in central to West.
  • Manager spread (Low impact but considered anyway): I have favoured having managers with people in as many groups as possible in APAC - I see us as having a role in cross-pollinating ideas/thoughts/challenges between the groups, and hearing from people in different groups gives us a broader perspective on both the opportunities and innovations you’re experiencing in your groups - right now we all have people in at least 4 of the 5 groups.

Related Activity

All of that said, the pain points of having groups of 5 & 6 with as much timezone spread as we have are not going away - but we’re hopeful that the proposal Wei-Meng has shared in [APAC] Better SGG ticket load balancing by havi... (#4904 - closed) will go some way to alleviating that.

cc: @gitlab-com/support/apac I will close this issue by end of week as it here for the purpose of recording the considerations and conclusions rather than necessitating further activity. Comments always welcomed.