Lessons learned managing the GitLab Data team

The blog post recounts the author's experience as the manager of the Data team at GitLab and the lessons learned during a period of rapid company growth. It highlights the challenges of balancing managerial duties with individual contributor roles, emphasizing the need to choose one path to avoid burnout. The author stresses the importance of strategic hiring, process investment, and the use of effective tools like dbt to enhance team productivity. The piece also underscores the significance of executive support for a data function, advocating for a dedicated data leadership role to promote data literacy organization-wide. The narrative reflects on the necessity of financial investment in building a data team and cautions against reinventing existing solutions. Finally, the author discusses the personal decision to return to an individual contributor role for better mental health and professional fit, illustrating that career paths in management and individual contribution are distinct and reversible.

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