 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering GitLab Commit 2020. Brought to you by GitLab. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE's coverage of GitLab Commit 2020 here in San Francisco. Kicking off our coverage of 2020, great developer show talking about the platform that GitLab is building and have one of the keynote presenters from this morning. Christy Leneville who is the user experience director at GitLab, thanks so much for joining us. It's my pleasure. All right, so one of the things that, you know, you and was talking in the keynote this morning was we have the sprawl of tools. And of course, one of the challenges people know is if you're talking different tools in different environments, the user interface is going to be different and therefore the stat I heard in the keynote was over 50% of DevOps time is wasted on logistics and repetitive tasks in all these environments. Before we dig into it, Christy, love just a little bit about your background because you hinted at it a little bit in your keynote that some past experiences you've had. So what led you to this role at GitLab? Yeah, so I've been in tech for about 20 years. Didn't go to school thinking that I would be a UXer one day because 20 years ago, frankly, that wasn't even a thing. But over the years I've gotten to work at Dell and General Motors, Rackspace and then a regional company that's still huge called HEB. So lots of enterprise, lots of tech, which is areas that I'm just really passionate about UX in. Yeah, well, when we talk so much about tech, I love one of the things I've looked at in my career is there's the cool tech, but how does design fit into these? There's of course the easy examples of Apple, but so many of the products when you talk about the difference between it being a utility and I love this thing, often is the design and that user experience piece of it. In the DevOps software world, give us a little bit of your world, the challenges that you're seeing, what differentiates an okay product versus something that customers are gonna be like, I love this, I want everybody to use it and wanna spread the gospel. Yeah, so building the types of tools that we are building at GitLab isn't sexy work, like working at Apple, but I'll tell you this, the designers who work on these types of tools are really deeply passionate about creating great experiences for people to do their jobs every day, which is a really exciting work. So what's interesting though is oftentimes people are coming from using these very outdated legacy tools, oftentimes they're internal tools that just don't have a great experience. So we get really excited about being able to take the type of tool that someone is, kind of like these folks don't have a choice, they're not getting to decide which tool they get to use to do their job, they have to use it and we are really respectful of that just because they have to use it doesn't mean that we want to take advantage of that. We want it to be a really excellent experience. All right, so Christy, I had heard before when you talk about GitLab, there's Dev, there's Sec, there's Ops, in the keynote you talked even groups like Finance and Marketing need to get involved, there's very different expectations and skillset when you talk about those roles, so help me understand a little bit, are there different interfaces based on my roles, is it just so simple that anybody should be able to understand it, help us understand how that works? So that's the goal, I'm not gonna tell you that they're there yet today, but that's the idea. So having worked in tech for such a long time, I've got a lot of experience with watching different roles, try to interact with these technical teams that use the tech teams. For them, this is bread and butter stuff, they know exactly what's going on and other roles really try to kind of bring themselves to the developers and that's what we're trying to make easy, so things like taxonomy play a huge role in that, the way that deeply technical people talk about the work that they do is very different from how people in other roles do and we're starting to think about how we can converge those two things just to make it easy for everyone. I love that because a few years ago there was oh, developers are the new king makers and they're gonna do off their thing but it kinda seemed like the developers were off on the side and they were gonna choose their tools and figure things out and then somebody eventually needed to pay for something and figure out how it works in the environment. The story I'm hearing and the maturation of that is the developers are closer to the business and these roles need to talk and communicate and fit together, is that what you're seeing? Yeah, that's absolutely right. All right, so GitLab also, your product line spans of just a broad spectrum, I don't have memorized the 10 categories that you need to fit, I believe there was a couple acquisitions that helped grow here but you start with SCM and CI, those alone making sure that those work together is a certain bit of work but how do you span the gamut and make sure that all these various pieces are gonna have some kind of coherent experience? Yeah, so we're also thinking about project planning that happens before SCM and CI ever starts and so we're thinking about how do we make it easy to take something from an idea, an issue, directly into that build process and then after that it's like, okay, so then what happens next, keeping it secure and then watching it to see what's going on, monitoring it and then just getting it out onto infrastructure through our ops features. Okay, talk a little bit about how you interact with the ecosystem and the community also, it's everything is open, you know, I wanted to see the meeting minutes, I can dive right in and do it and we heard lots of examples in the presentations about oh, some change has been made or Sid, your CEO joked, somebody corrects my grammar and that's not necessary, oh, maybe it is somebody inside the company but that dynamic is to make sure you have something that is coherent when you have so many different internal and external constituencies that will be opinionated as to how things should go. Yeah, so, let's see here, ask me again, sorry. So, you get all these other constituents that want to kind of have a stake and probably have an opinion as to how things should go, how do you make sure it works, not just for GitLab but all of your customers and the partner ecosystem that you're building around it. Thank you, so we do take the comments that come in on issues very seriously, my team is looking at that, our product managers are certainly looking at that and we look at that as directional information where my team really takes that though is then we dive in and we do UX research. So, we are very mindful of the fact that the comments that are coming in, we don't take them literally, we take them as kind of advice about where do you dig in next. So, what my team is doing is figuring out what roles are really interested in this future going out and either doing surveys or talking directly to customers, doing qualitative interviews or we're sitting down and saying, okay, so we get it, you have some feedback here and that's wonderful but what were you trying to do? How did you even get here? Where did you want to go next? What things are working well for you? What things aren't working as well? I mean, that's a lot of what we do. You've got a global environment that this is going into, what challenges does that put on what you're doing? Yeah, it brings a lot of challenges. One of the bigger challenges that it brings is in our UI copy, right? So, field labels, things like that. We really try to be mindful about that so in a couple of different ways. So, the way that people talk about things is different throughout the world. We try to be mindful about not using things like jargon so that everything is clear and easy to understand no matter where you are. We also think about things like length of text which can have a really big impact so we know, German, tends to have some long words. We have to be mindful of that as we're writing UX copy because in the end we want this to be as easy for everyone to understand as possible the moment that they look at it. All right, how about announcements? I understand the 22nd of every month is when code drops so just bring us up to speed as to what people should know about GitLab product today. Yeah, so we release features at an industry-changing velocity. I have never seen anything like it and I'm always gonna think from a UX perspective, UX is deeply involved in that. So, there is not a release that goes by where you as a customer or a user can't actually see the impact of the release. Yeah, things are happening behind the scenes and we're shoring things up and strengthening the backend but we're doing things on the front end constantly. And my designers and researchers know that they're on the hook for that and so they're always thinking about what's that next thing that we can deliver. All right, so Christy, dark mode for everything now? Dark mode has definitely been something that we have heard from our user base that they really want. Something that we're working on is a good design system so that we have single source of truth components. We'll make, that'll make it much easier for us to do the dark mode that we know is a legitimate ask from our user base. Yeah, absolutely. Anything else, just trends or things that you're looking at for 2020? Trends that we're looking at, you know, it's interesting. I'll be honest, I don't think that we think a lot about trends. What we're really doing is we are looking at the feedback that's coming in directly from our user base and then we're trying to make decisions based on that. So actually, I couldn't say that we have any trends per se. Well, you know, mobile drove a lot of the last decade or so. Are any of the voice or interactive type of platforms have any impact on what you're doing yet? Yeah, so we are thinking about mobile. We're not thinking about it in terms of native mobile apps. We're really trying to think about it in terms of just making a really good responsive experience. We're trying to get a better sense of which jobs are most commonly done on mobile devices so that we can focus first on making those better. But that's also something we're trying to think about with every design. So I see my designers doing a really good job these days. So they put together a design. They're thinking about it in terms of desktop. And then I see them pivot and think, okay, so what does this now look like on a mobile device? So we have a lot of work to do in this area. I'm not gonna tell you that we don't, but I see us getting better and better all the time. Christy, thanks so much for giving us all the updates. Really great to dig into it. Yeah, it's been my pleasure. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.