 Hey, it's magic. We're all here. Welcome Welcome to my first functional update. Let me share my screen because we're already a minute behind and We'll get started Welcome everyone What was that? Good morning? Yeah, yeah, I'm going out for the wearer's Waldo look today Nice So give me a quick second gonna share my screen and we'll get started Boom everyone you should be able to see my screen. Yes Looking for a thumbs up from you. All right, cool. Awesome We'll dive in support functional update number one from Lee. Let's do it I want to start first because get lab and the greater internet sub-grader internet We'll be able to watch this forever and I want to dive in and talk about what support and the support team is responsible for our priorities are Premium customers who have a four-hour service level agreement with us our enterprise edition customers who pay us for next day Support and on occasion we will provide community support to people involved in the get lab community and That falls more under community advocacy, but we are involved, but I want to set That expectation and make that clear if anyone was ever confused about what we're responsible for I also Want to take a minute to dive in and talk about where you can get support You can go to support that get lab calm and Fill out a form there and get support for your version of get lab if you're on get lab hosted Enterprise edition calm or if you're CE and have a question You can come to us via the channel if you are a customer You can reach out to support at get lab calm and that'll get to our desk And if you are a CE user you can go to forum dot get lab calm to get help with CE related issues I Would like to start with our accomplishments, you know start with the things that we've been crushing and the top of the list goes to Drew Everybody knows Drew Drew is a phenomenal service engineer and this month. He was promoted to staff service engineer and He exemplifies what we want from a service engineer. He is kind. He's knowledgeable He has technical expertise and he's always willing to dive in to the unknown So I just want to give him a shout out to Drew. He has been promoted to our highest service engineer position staff service engineer I've also been promoted to support lead, which has been a lot of fun. This is my first functional update very excited about that I also in that transition Ernst and I have been spending a lot of time Working on tightening up the metrics what metrics are important and reporting on those metrics We have data and we're going to dive into that in a little bit That data is now being reported on and it is my express responsibility to continue to improve our data The integrity of it and our performance The other thing that was exciting in the past few months that we've accomplished There is a new technical interview process for service engineers if you are a part of GitLab You can see support issue number 267 That's where we outlined this and I want to give a shout out to DeVette I want to give a shout out to Chris and Drew a heavily involved in that process Stan as well jumped in from engineering to make that process really smooth It's already had a huge impact in making our hiring more effective and more efficient So shout out to those people involved there Also DeVette is a geo expert. You can go to the team page and check out what that means You can click on geo and see what geo is about and you can see what an expert at GitLab means So if you're not sure go to the team page learn more about DeVette's geo expertise and lastly I was invited to speak at a conference in Philadelphia called Elevate Conference It is focused around support and I will be giving a talk called Handclap emoji remote hand clap emoji support hand clap emoji teams About the problems that we face as a remote support team They're similar to regular support teams and the things that we benefit from being a remote support team And I think it's gonna be really interesting and really fun that would be recorded So you'll be able I'll share that with the team once it is recorded I'd like to dive in next To our hashtag goals what we're focused on and I'm gonna talk about this graph talk about some data and Jump in here So a big thing that we need to do in support is shrink our backlog. We have a ticket open for this Support number 17. This is about shrinking our backlog and I'm gonna take a minute and explain what backlog is in case You're not familiar with the term. It's basically anything That is not explicitly Solved by the support team So the normal workflow in support is you know, we solve it and that we've marked it as closed Anything that is not explicitly marked as closed is considered backlog. You can think of it as debt things that we have to get through So let's look at this graph. Let's dive in we can see that, you know, it peaked around January 19th at about 15,000 those are 15,000 tickets over the lifetime of GitLab that need to be resolved and it sounds crazy and I'm gonna dive in and explain what's happening here a Lot of those tickets are around Channels that we were piping into Zendesk that we are no longer using things like a reddit piping reddit data into Zendesk and answering things there Google alerts and all of these integrations that were no longer using So they're just kind of piling up piling up and you could see on January 21st We did a huge push to shut down a couple of those integrations and got rid of about 5,000 tickets in the backlog that were not actionable like these were not customer requests. These were not anything to do with things that we needed to act on it was just data that was Sitting in there messing up our backlog numbers. You can also see around January 31st. There was a spike That spike is Twitter Twitter is also calculated in here because community advocacy Team uses Zendesk to respond to Twitter. So you could see the impact on The support load the days that we had the outage Community advocacy had a spike and they resolved it pretty quickly. So shout out to the CA team But that's captured in our data as well so that's something that we're trying to shrink the backlog because the backlog is One of the easiest ways to see the health of a support department and right now We have a lot of things that are Obstructing that and it's making it hard for us to see how healthy we are I have made some views that get me a rough number, but we still need to audit the data It's it's tough because there's so many channels that we're not using that pop up and you're like, oh man This data is not accurate, but my Inkling right now is our natural backlog is about 200 tickets. So at any given moment Support has about 200 things that need to be resolved. Literally. That's not an exaggeration So just want to give some perspective to the support process In that why this is important one of our okay ours revolves around Reducing time to solve by 50% so a ticket will come in when the ticket is created a clock starts And that clock does not stop until the ticket is solved so every ticket in the backlog right now those things about Reddit those Google alerts those types of things have a clock that is just ticking and counting against us if you will and We are trying to get those out of the way so that we can see our true time to solve and Reduce that so you can see this graph here. It looks crazy and and that spike in January is because 5,000 Tickets related to Reddit that were non-actionable were closed that blew up the numbers and you might be thinking like can you make a view that? Excludes those yes, but again, it gets hard auditing that data because There's so many other ones that end up popping up that skew the data So we're trying to get the data as clean as possible so we can make simpler charts That will allow us to have better insight into that data So because this is an okay are because we'll be reporting on this and giving updates on this I want to make it clear to the team. These numbers are going to get even crazier It's gonna look even worse the spikes are gonna get even higher But that's on our way to tightening up the process right now. There is not a process around this So that's why things are getting all wonky and I want to communicate that we're aware of that the data will show that and then in the next few months the data should look great as we Bring that down or it might not if we hit challenges We'll see but I am confident that we can reduce our time to solve once we get a handle on what it is and how we can do that The other things that I'm really excited about The support team is phenomenal because I truly believe that everyone is dedicated to bettering themselves and You can see that here Most of the support team right now is training on some new topic You can see a lot of us are focused around LDAP LDAP is something that get lab uses a lot a lot of our customers use that and we want to Get better and be certified experts just like DeVette did for Geo a lot of us want that that tag on our team paid on the Team page showing that for the skills that we have but that we've proven that we have so that's really exciting shout-outs of the service engineering team for Continuing to grow. I'm very happy and excited about that The last thing I want to focus on an end-on which is really interesting that I need your help with get lab and greater internet We are hiring as you know service engineering is hiring. We're explicitly looking for Two people in Asia Pacific one in the Americas two in EMEA Those numbers might flex around as we identify need if that changes, but that's what we're forecasting now And this chart shows how stringent our interview process is Most people don't even make it to the phone screen, you know, and that's That's because it takes a special kind of person to be a service engineer You need someone who's kind who's willing to dive into the unknown and who has technical knowledge You know, so we need your help in finding people to come and join our service engineering team And make it through our new and improved interview process So I urge you if you know anyone especially in EMEA or APAC that you think would be a good fit That you think would enjoy the role, please please please send us send them our way And we'll take a look and we'll see if they fit our criteria. So Really excited first function update. You're gonna start next one. There's gonna be a lot more data We're gonna get the numbers really really honed in Audited in a great way and it's gonna be so awesome So I want to take this time to open up for questions what I'm gonna do is stop this share and I'll jump in and I'll see if there's anything in there Chris Wilson's we've got elevate summit Does the clock stop okay, so ZJ asks does the clock stop when it's their action or total ticket time? The clock does not stop when it's their action as far as I know I can I will confirm that for you. There are Other clocks that measure other things. So I do want to acknowledge that yes, I'm sure there's a clock where There's agent work time that shows us how long we've been working on it But total time to solve as far as I know is just wall time How long did it take to get from the time it said when the ticket started to the time it said when the ticket ended CJ? Yeah, Andrew chimed in there Jim says are we gonna backfill for you and drew here? I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that Jim if you want to type in another Explanation there and Jim asked how big is our team today? There are 11 service engineers one support lead So 12 total on the service engineering team and yeah But if anyone else has any questions I'll leave this open for about another three minutes or so if not Just go and enjoy a great day some guys Yeah, so Jim's asking about hiring and about filling building up a lot of the team is growing Jim specifically wants to know as people move up in support. What's our plan? We're we're looking to hire Inimmediate to senior level engineers. We want to bring in talent. The talent we have is awesome I love the team and we're all growing and so we are trying to everyone level up And if you look at the support team okay ours, everyone has become service a senior service engineer You know or go to the next step. So there is already a personal focus Everyone on the team is trying to level up. So yes, we are going that way Ding out at 60 troll. I'm not not sure what that one means But that'll be forever on my questions of what that means But yeah, I don't see any other questions flooring in so I think we're safe to call this a fun first functional update Thank you all for joining and I will see you on the team call peace