maggiemartin

This README is intended to be helpful for colleagues at GitLab.

Role and Leadership Philosophy

I'm GitLab's Product Security Team’s Manager, Product Security Engineering.

Tenets

• Provide for the Team
  • Empowerment
    • Security is everyone's job; but, someone has to provide direction, training, and tooling to do that.
  • Knowledge
    • Everyone has knowledge to share.
    • Don’t be afraid to share.
    • Don’t be afraid to be challenged.
  • Autonomy
    • My Teammates are paragmatists who favor a “bias for action” over perfection (“Perfection is the enemy of good” - Voltaire).
    • Autonomy establishes, builds, and maintains Trust.
    • Autonomy is core to being a Manager of One.
  • Direction
    • Per CREDIT:
      • We will take a collaborative, customer focused (internal and external) approach.
      • Analyze and improve effeciencies quantifiably whenever possible.
      • Maintain inclusivity (Everyone’s voice is valid).
      • Iterate often in order to provide products and features that will be Cost Effective, Actionable, Performant, and Secure (CAPs)¹.
      • Deliver and improve our Transparency Competencies.
• Challenge
  • Provide a safe space for individuals to be challenged but supported.
• Innovate the state of security and each other
  • Everyone can contribute Contribute with GitLab.
  • Even the smallest changes can have big and lasting impact.
  • We succeed and fail as a Team; so might as well trust each other and help everyone grow (“A rising tide lifts all ships” - John F. Kennedy)

Communication and Working Style

Communication

Timezone: EST

• Mornings are my best times to focus on Team and personally required inputs and outputs (generally 7am to 12pm).
• Afternoons are my best times to take meetings (12pm to 4pm). However, this is flexible.
• Family time is mostly 4pm to 7pm. After which, I will work with my Teammembers a few days a week in other timezones.
• Fridays are hard focus days, so please keep that in mind when scheduling meetings (reviewing the past week and planning the next week).
• In off-hours, under urgency, please reach me via text or signal (text preferred).

Working Style

• Show me what you are trying to say. I am a visual kinesthetic learner. So I need to see and then do things with information to remember it effectively.
• Be upfront with needs and/ or expectations. I am neurodivergent and need to go from what I know to what I don’t know. I build bridges of understand. I do not pick up on others' inference most of the time.
• Be transparent and direct. Rather have hard conversations now then have issues fester. I am thick-skinned, so if you have something to tell me, be direct. I love feedback; it helps me to drive my Team and my own personal growth.
• Information prioritization. I may not review the information you provided as quickly as you may like.
  • I keep a priority queue of information to consume, the rest goes into a stack of folders in my Bookmarks and/ or note taking application.
  • If you need something to be seen quicker, follow the pervious list items, so I can reevaluate my priority of the information queue.

Background

• LinkedIn

References