undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmbesto7y ago0 comments

Please take my comment as playing devil's advocate, and not a negative "what do you think you're doing" question.

> If we would not have shipped new features and still did just just version control GitLab the company would not be viable.

Says who? I can name hundreds of enterprise software companies that don't ship new features on a regular basis and are still commercially very viable. In other words, what evidence do you have that if you spent 3 months just shipping performance improvements that it would slow your growth?

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

sytse7y ago· 2 in thread

Thanks for asking. If you get back on the same pace after 3 months it would be acceptable. However I think this unlikely. From the linked page https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/#how-do-we-keep-shippi... "Don't ever slow down because it is very hard to recover from that. As soon as you stop shipping (for a big refactor, a security initiative, etc.) it is very hard to get back op to the old speed. The organization has accepted a slower rate and there are always enough reasons to go slower. You have to do the refactors and other things during the course of business, never slow down."

boundlessdreamz7y ago

I think this is probably wrong. You need customers to love the product. Polish matters. Which is why github/slack is still used and loved more than bitbucket/hipchat.

Velocity for sake of velocity is not going to result in customer delight

sytse7y ago

I agree polish (user experience) is very important in winning people over. We think the worst user experience is between product categories in the DevOps lifecycle. Having to switch between JIRA, GitHub, circleCI, Artifactory, Ansible, and New Relic. We want to create a better flow. Therefore we have to balance polishing what we have with completing out vision of a single application for the DevOps lifecycle.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse