Fernando Diaz from the GitLab developer relations team shadowed me for a week-long program modeled after GitLab’s CEO shadow program. He attended meetings on topics including infrastructure/engineering allocation, anti-abuse planning, and product management. He gained visibility into how a director operates at scale.
Key takeaways from Fernando’s blog:
- Directors drive decisions through structured, data-forward meetings (single document, review together, decide)
- My domain spanned abuse prevention, ML/data science, and security — and he’d spent ~3 years building context across those areas
- He contributed feedback on merge requests covering internship working groups, team renaming (ModelOps → DataScience), abuse pipeline prevention, and login compatibility bugs
Fernando came away with clarity on his own growth path and continued mentorship from me after the program ended.
Leave a Reply