How TeamOps Principles Foster Discontinuous Innovation at GitLab

How TeamOps principles foster discontinuous innovation at GitLab

  1. TeamOps, as an Operating Model, emphasizes the importance of Decision Velocity and Agency
  2. Discontinuous Innovation is not a small evolutionary step and difficult to predict.
  3. TeamOps fosters Discontinuous Innovation by encouraging 2-way-door Decisions.
  4. GitLab encourages everyone to question and propose alternatives to past decisions.
  5. Explicit Opportunity for undistracted incubation is another aspect of the GitLab way with TeamOps.
  6. TeamOps allows GitLab to benefit from both, high decision velocity and market changing disruptive innovations.

What is TeamOps?

TeamOps is an Operating Model that aims to help teams and organizations make greater progress by focusing on how team members relate and work together.

It is based on four guiding principles:

These principles are supported by a set of action tenets that provide guidance on how to put them into practice.

TeamOps emphasizes the importance of transparency, flexibility, and empowerment in order to create a more efficient, productive, and satisfying work environment. It is based on the belief that everyone should have the opportunity to contribute and that organizations should focus on measuring results rather than inputs such as hours worked.

By adopting the principles and action tenets of TeamOps, organizations can create a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement that helps them achieve their goals and objectives more effectively.

It has been developed and tested at GitLab, and is now being offered to other organizations as a way to improve their operations.

What is discontinuous innovation?

Discontinuous innovation, also known as disruptive innovation, refers to a type of innovation that creates a new market or significantly changes an existing market by introducing a product or service that is significantly better or cheaper than what is currently available.

It often involves the development of a new technology or business model that disrupts the existing market, making it difficult for incumbent firms to compete.

Discontinuous innovation can be difficult to predict and risky for organizations to pursue, as it often involves significant changes to existing business models and technologies.

However, it can also lead to significant growth and success for companies that are able to successfully introduce disruptive products or services to the market.

Why does discontinuous innovation need fostering in TeamOps?

TeamOps, with its action tenets, accelerates your organization’s Decision Velocity tremendously.

All Decisions focused to the smallest scope on the lowest level stepping through evolutionary iterations driven by a designated Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI), lead to the fittest solution surviving as a Minimal Viable Change (MVC).

Umpteen resolutions keep your organization agile and its change velocity high.

Everyone in your organization should feel free to disagree with a decision, after they commit and act according to the resolution. A collaborative decision, following the TeamOps model, does not need a consensus, but can always be questioned, iterated upon or even reverted. Treating every decision as a 2-way-door, rolling back on an iteration and implementing the better solution is the rule, realizing blameless problem solving.

The high decision velocity empowers your teams and the whole organization to adapt and get more efficient.

This leads to more focus on small agile iterations, than on the big changing ideas in your teams.

Empowered and involved in the organization, your team members will strive to continuously make their day-to-day tasks and products more efficient as well as remove waste.

To stay ahead of the curve and be competitive in the market, your organization needs also to continuously look for new and innovative ways to solve problems and create value.

Additionally to a high decision velocity an organization can stay relevant and adapt to changing market conditions, by incubating disruptive innovations.

How does GitLab foster discontinuous innovation with TeamOps?

GitLab facilitates discontinuous innovations in several ways.

Everything can be questioned

GitLab’s sub value “Disagree, commit, and disagree”, in the “Results” section of the six “CREDIT” core values, implements the reversibility of every decision, replacing it with a better one. Every team member can propose a better solution for a past decision and expect valid feedback plus the possibility for implementation.

A great example of this is the Transformation of GitLab itself to one Platform instead of many tools.

In 2016 Kamil Trzciński, at the time a fresh full member of the GitLab team, approached GitLab’s co founder Dimitri Zaporozhets with the idea to fuse GitLab Source Code Management (SCM) and Continuous Integration (CI) into one DevOps Tool and was many times rejected.

The tools should stay lean and simple. A fusion would build a complicated Monolith.

While committing to this decision and contributing to the source code of both tools, Kamil ideated a common tool with all the synergies and advantages one all encompassing DevOps Platform has for the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

At the end Dimitri and his other co-founder, Sid Sijbrandij, saw the value in the direction Kamil had proposed. You can listen to the story told by himself here.

Kamil’s discontinuous innovation, away from the market prevailing many small tools in the DevOps sector, led GitLab to hold the position of the one DevSecOps Plattform, reducing cost, effort and complexity for all its customers.

Explicit room for long-term bets

To expand GitLab’s Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) in areas, which fit within GitLab’s company mission that are currently not serviced, the Incubation Engineering Department has been founded.

In this division, Single-engineer Groups move fast, ship, get feedback, and iterate on specific ideas to draw benefits, but not distractions, from within the larger organization.

The established Software Demo Process facilitates asynchronous collaboration, iterative feedback, and minimal alignment with the rest of GitLab while keeping the autonomy of this incubator.

Through TeamOps as operational model at GitLab, this extension of the organization has and will lead to disruptive innovations in the product, for example ⛅🌱 Cloud Seed and OKR Management.

Conclusion

Fostering discontinuous innovation is important for GitLab, because it will lead to significant competitive advantages and help them stay ahead of the curve in the DevSecOps sector.

With TeamOps as the operational model in GitLab, fostering discontinuous innovation is supported by several principles and action tenets.

First, the principle of enabling everyone to contribute encourages a diverse range of perspectives and ideas, which can be essential for generating new and innovative solutions. By providing equal opportunities for all team members to contribute, regardless of level, function, or location, organizations can create an environment that is more conducive to innovative thinking.

Second, the principle of maximizing decision velocity helps organizations act quickly on new ideas, rather than getting bogged down in lengthy decision-making processes. This can be especially important in the fast-moving software industry, where time is of the essence.

Third, the sub value of “Disagree, commit, and disagree” facilitates team members to ideate and propose better solutions for decisions taken in the past. This empowers everyone to come up with a disruptive innovation to a problem, which was not solved in the best way.

Finally, the principle of transparent measurement helps organizations focus on results rather than inputs, which can encourage a focus on innovation rather than simply meeting short-term targets. By measuring and rewarding results rather than the number of hours worked or other inputs, organizations can create an environment that encourages team members to take risks and try new things.

At GitLab, these principles are supported by a number of action tenets, including asynchronous workflows, which allow team members to collaborate and contribute on their own time, and Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs), who are empowered to make decisions and take ownership of projects.

GitLab also emphasizes the importance of iteration and encourages team members to break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable pieces that can be tackled one step at a time.

Overall, the principles and action tenets of TeamOps can create an environment that supports and fosters discontinuous innovation by empowering team members to take ownership of their work, encouraging creativity and risk-taking, and focusing on continuous iteration and learning.

Free Training and Certification - Your start into TeamOps

If you are interested in learning more about TeamOps and how to implement this operating model, signup for the free Teamops Certification by GitLab.