Presentation: A Public Handbook: Building trust with the team, customers, and beyond

How do you build trust before you ever interact with others? A public handbook! Having a handbook publicly available provides lots of benefits including consistency for the team, being literally on the same page as a customer, and providing the opportunity to collaborate with others, such as the Support community.

Presented at Support Driven Expo 2023. Continue reading “Presentation: A Public Handbook: Building trust with the team, customers, and beyond”

Reflection: The last third of my fifth year at GitLab and expanding Staff Support Engineer

Normally, my blog post would have been up sooner, but I was on a break for a couple of weeks when my work anniversary came around.

This year’s blog posts were also broken up into smaller parts, so this one only covers February 2023 to mid-June 2023.

If you haven’t read them already, you may want to take a look at my first fifth year reflection post and my reflection on being the Acting Chief of Staff to CTO for our fourth quarter to get a sense of what I’ve been doing so far in my fifth year. If you’re a first time reader, you may want to read one or more of my previous reflections posts for more context. Continue reading “Reflection: The last third of my fifth year at GitLab and expanding Staff Support Engineer”

Reflection: Acting Chief of Staff to CTO at GitLab

For our company’s fourth quarter (Q4, November 2022 to January 2023), I was the Acting Chief of Staff to CTO. In February, I’m getting back into my regular role as a Staff Support Engineer, while also spending a little bit of time transitioning anything left and ensuring any “loose threads” are tied up. Since there’s quite a bit to write about, and the role is so different from my regular role, I thought it deserved its own post. Continue reading “Reflection: Acting Chief of Staff to CTO at GitLab”

TeamOps: Ensuring a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) at scale

Note: This was an “assignment” for TeamOps training, but thought I might as well post it here!

In small organizations, it’s generally easy to know what is the definitive source of truth since there aren’t that many places to look. Often, the source of truth is a particular document, or person. However, as organizations grow, different people or teams often remember or document the same things in different ways, and in different places. This is why it’s important to have a Single Source of Truth (SSoT). Continue reading “TeamOps: Ensuring a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) at scale”

Reflection: First third of my fifth year at GitLab and defining Staff Support Engineer

Normally, I wait until at least the half-year mark to do a reflection post, but this year for the 4th quarter, I am doing a rotation for the Acting Chief of Staff to CTO role, which deserves its own post. So, I’m doing the first reflection post now to cover mid-June 2022 to the end of October 2022.

If you’re a first time reader, you may want to read one or more of my previous reflections posts. Continue reading “Reflection: First third of my fifth year at GitLab and defining Staff Support Engineer”