Episode

The GitLab way: Kindness, transparency, and short toes | David DeSanto (CPO)

David DeSanto, chief product officer at GitLab, describes the company's unusually transparent culture, including publishing team meetings on YouTube, maintaining a fully public handbook other companies fork, and open issue trackers that let customers and open-source contributors shape the roadmap. He explains GitLab's core values like kindness and "short toes," tactical advice for remote-first teams (async communication, over-communicating, letting fires burn), and how GitLab shifted from a breadth-first to a depth-first product strategy while building AI features across the DevOps lifecycle.