A transparency AMA (Ask Me Anything) session facilitated by PlatoHQ mentoring.
I gave this talk a couple of years ago, and looking back, it captures something I was still processing myself — what it actually means to operate inside a company that treats transparency as a genuine value, not a talking point.
GitLab publishes almost everything. The strategy, the product roadmap, the handbook, the org chart, the security incidents, and the phishing test results. Not as a PR move. Just because that’s how they think information should flow. When I arrived, my first reaction was somewhere between impressed and nervous. Impressed because I could actually understand what the company was doing and why. Nervous because our competitors could too.
That tension never fully went away, but I stopped thinking it was the wrong tradeoff.
The most concrete example I walked through in the talk was from one of my teams, which was working on integrating Kafka into a pub/sub architecture. The requirements and issues were public within the company, and another team stumbled across them and reached out — they were considering using Kafka too. They traded notes. Both implementations got better. That kind of thing happened constantly. The value wasn’t just philosophical; it showed up in the work.
The question I got asked most, in this talk and in others, was some version of: “But what about your competitors?” My honest answer was that your competitors already know more about you than you think. They talk to your customers. Your customers share your slide decks. The edge you think you’re protecting by keeping things quiet is smaller than you assume. GitLab’s view, and the one I came to share, is that execution matters more than secrecy. Iterate fast, consider all feedback, and build better things for your customers.
That said, I wasn’t up there arguing that every company should be as transparent as GitLab. Some can’t be, for legitimate reasons. Some won’t be, because the culture is set and hard to move. What I said then, and still believe, is that most companies are less transparent than they actually could be. The risks get overestimated. The benefits of collaboration, trust, and faster problem-solving are underestimated.
For teams not starting from a transparent-by-default culture, my advice was simple: start small. Pick low-risk things. Show what happens when more people have access to information. Document it. Then expand from there. Don’t try to flip the whole culture at once. That’s how you get backlash without the proof points to counter it.
The other thing I emphasized: if you ask for feedback, respond to it. Not necessarily agree with it — but close the loop. Tell people what you’re doing and what you’re not. That discipline is what makes transparency actually work, and what separates it from just broadcasting.
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