Assalamu alaikum khabati no hazrat, Vaseem Hassan welcomes you to lecture number 43 of Brand Management, MKT 624 at the Virtual University of Pakistan. We are going to discuss the topic of Brand Planning. After having learned all the basic elements of the management process relating to the branding strategies, we are now all set to look at those important points which really should be considered while you come up with a plan. Now this plan may relate to introducing a new brand or this may relate to reappraising an existing brand, the process of the brand planning remains the same. I am going to talk about this process in three different steps and these three different steps are going to be spread over three lectures including the one we are into right now. The steps are the corporate strategy and brands. This basically means how the brands should be treated at the topmost level of the corporations. In other words the kind of support with which the top management must give its brands so that that support gets translated into the actions on part of all those who are going to execute those strategies. The second step is what you may call the planning process itself. Now the planning process relates all those elements that we have learned so far within the course. The meaning all those steps that took us from one phase to another phase in relation to leveraging the brand, starting with the brand's vision into the brand's positioning and so on and so forth. Those are the steps that we shall be taking into consideration while we go through the planning process. So in other words this process is going to be very educative from the standpoint that not only are we going to learn how should we go about it while we are dealing with certain brands within our areas of responsibilities. This also allows us an opportunity of revising in a summarized way of course and in a very practical way all those elements that we have learned so far. The third step of the brand planning process is what you may call the strategic document or the actual brand plan. This document basically is a framework of the strategies which you are going to employ and this is going to be a very handy kind of a template for all of you wherever you are relating developing a plan whether that may be for a new brand or that may be for an existing brand. So in other words you are going to have something ready made onto which you are going to fit various strategies which you think should be employed for your respective brand in the practical field. And having said already the process relates equally well to the launching a new brand or re-appraising an existing one. What this process really does to the brand is that it really challenges certain preconceptions or assumptions that you may have within the company relating to the brand, its movement in the marketplace and relating factors. So in other words what this branding process necessitates is the need for a very clear cut strategy and that is the strategy which really challenges those preconceptions and assumptions which I just indicated. And this automatically also means that this branding strategy has got to be at the center of the corporate strategy and that goes without saying because we know that the branding strategy has to stem from the inner core of the corporate strategy which will show us the way toward the brand's vision and keeping in view that vision we are going to decide what is it that it is going to take in order to reach the destination because you will recall the vision is that you are standing here today in terms of your brand and you want to reach a certain destination and whatever is going to be covered between this point and that point is going to be a combination of various strategies which you are going to put in place together for execution of the brand's movements. There are many companies that are following this approach. The fact is that most of the good companies all follow this approach because this is the very well structured approach which does not leave anything to chance. It considers everything very analytically, meaning all the elements of the branding process very analytically just to make sure that your strategic moves are free of any flaws, at least those which you really can think of and the ones which might have the negative potential to cause disturbances as the brand moves by. There also are companies which do a lot of talk about the brand planning process, give the process a lot of lip service but do not really follow it and through the letter and spit it. Proceeding with the understanding of the whole process, the first step that is required on part of the top management of the company is that they must have a very clear understanding of the two strategic elements that really lay the foundation of this planning process. Those elements are pretty well known to you. Number one is the top management must define the essence of the brand and this in other words means that the management has got to be very clear about the brand model and this is something which really takes us back to the dimensions of the brand which we learned in our lecture number three in the very beginning of the course and you will recall that any brand has four different dimensions. There is a certain set of functions to which any brand is supposed to be performing for the target market the brand is meant for and the second dimension that you will recall is that a brand has a certain set of differentiated characteristics which are meant for the segment the brand is operating in and without a decent level of differentiation no brand really can make its mark in the marketplace and again power and offer value to the company and to its customers and number three value you will recall is the set of aims and the actual values in terms of the benefits the physical benefits and the emotional benefits which the brand offers to the target audience have to be taken into account. The fourth dimension and also a very important dimension is all about the brand's personality and the imagery that we are planning to create for the customers to perceive the brand the way it is planned. So these four important dimensions of any brand are the ones about which the top management of the company has to be very clear off. Now when it is said that it doesn't mean they do not understand that what it really means is that the top management has got to agree on all the four dimensions and the agreement is a function of the ability of the management and the overall company to deliver all those dimensions to their customers. If the company feels that it doesn't really have the resources to execute the essence which is being talked about then the company has got to be very honest to itself and forthright in either bringing about certain changes to the essence which is being talked about and hence define the brand from that particular standpoint or may discard it. The second element I mean strategic element about which the top management has got to be clear off is what you may call the brand architecture and this is something which really takes us back to our learning about the portfolios of brand and different to the branding strategies that we learned about when we develop product relationship with brands and you will recall there are so many different strategies that I talked about in relation to those interrelations meaning the brand product interrelations. Product brand strategy, line brand strategy, brand strategy, endorsing the brand strategy and the source of the branding and so on and so forth. Those were the strategies that really the word talked about in relation to the connection between the brand and the product. So once they are clear about that that they have got to make sure we are in the portfolio of the brands that this particular one really fits into. Once the top management is clear about these two fundamental elements, the understanding of the brand has got to be communicated to all concerned about execution and this is the understanding which again you will recall has taken place with the help of all those from different functions responsible for the total branding effort. So in other words it is at this point that the significance of the top most brand steering committee comes in and once this agreement has taken place this now has to be communicated. The communication is extremely important from the point of view that all those at the middle level and at the low level and also at the lowest possible level within the company have got to know the decisions taken by the company in relation to the execution process. And importance of communication has already been talked about and I do not really have to touch upon all those benefits which internal communication offers. The fundamental point of significance is that you should leave no stone unturned. The management of the company should leave no stone unturned in disseminating that particular decision taken by the top management within the company. It has got to be communicated and it is because of that communication that the sense of ownership is going to be developed and the ones that the sense is developed that you get on with the whole process. Let me tell you many marketing strategies that fail in the marketplace not because the marketing strategies were not really creative enough or ingenious enough did not take all the elements into account. No. Those marketing strategies fail because not enough was done in relation to communicating those within the company. So in other words all the people within the company who really were required to know what the strategies meant so that they really could gear themselves up for execution of those strategies were not really aware of those and that offered the company a very serious problem of lack of coordination which really stemmed from the lack of communication. So this really explains the importance of communication which has to be carried out internally within the organization in order to make sure that everyone understands the strategic part. Every one is supposed to be knowing and supposed to be executing. So the importance of the concept could not be emphasized anymore. The reason you carry out this effort of internal communication is because you want to make sure that the agreement that was taken place among the members of the top management that could be communicated. That's where I started talking about the importance of communication. So back to that point of disseminating that agreement to all concerned within the company. It is done through a technique with what you could make all an internal workshop. An internal workshop of the high ups is conducted within the organization and that workshop consists of again those people who form in most of the cases the Brand Steering Committee because they are the people who are concerned about the strategic considerations underlying any given brand. So they form part of that workshop and they consider different strategic questions of very high importance. The kind of questions which are discussed among them are what kind of values customers and consumers will miss if this brand was not to be launched or if this brand was not there at all. The discussion of this question brings to the surface the level of interpretations by all from across different functions especially in relation to the brand's identity. The question here is if the interpretations done by the different people from different functions within the company are not really uniformed then there is something wrong with what they are discussing. Meaning the essence or the brand model which they talked about and the brand architecture which they talked about are not really consistent and there are certain elements which they definitely missed. So this is one of the importance of this kind of a question. Another reason this question must be asked under any circumstances we know that any brand identity is basically coined by a set of values. The brand identity you will recall is not just about the packaging or the appearance of the brand, its colors, the typeface and so on and so forth. It is something which has got to form the inner core of the brand. And whatever you do in terms of your packaging and in terms of the brand name and in terms of the total imagery is an outward expression of the inner core which you must offer your target market. And therefore the values which are at that core have got to be understood and there has got to be a uniformed interpretation of those values. Now what are those values? This also takes us back to the dimensions of the brand and the essence of the brand or the brand model and I pointed out at the beginning of the lecture that discussion about the brand planning process is going to be absolutely beautiful and educative because whatever I talked about is going to be in relation to what you already have learned and therefore it is going to be a very effective revision of those factors and elements. So back to the values, what are those values which you must talk about? If you are going to launch a mineral water, you have got to be concerned about your customer's health and their well-being. In other words, the health and well-being of your customers is a set of values that you really care about. Now the next question which must flash into your mind says are you really in a position to take care of these values? The meaning, you really can introduce a brand which really has these values at the core and having these values at the core means that you have got to be able to produce that and then you have got to be able to sell that through the effective channels and then you have got to be very effective in terms of the integration of the total communication campaign which talks about these fundamental values of your brand. Another example that could be relating cars that you are going to introduce a car and you really are concerned about your customers who you think must enjoy the ride. Now the basic value of this brand is that your customers must enjoy the ride. In order for your customers to enjoy the ride, you have to look into so many different strategic elements of the production area and the quality assurance area. You have got to build into the process a complete quality with very convincing thoughtness so that that quality really can form the basis of the value that you are talking about. If you are a company that is going to offer something which is just about the basic benefits of the car, they may not enjoy the ride. They may get the good mileage out of the gasoline that gets into the car but that is not really compatible with the value which the management is talking about. So in other words, whatever you are able to produce must not be at odds with the value which is at the core of the brand. So I would say that this is the beautiful revision of the dimensions of the brand. Another question which you must consider as part of that workshop is does this brand really offer high class quality with the end value and this is the question which I already have explained with the help of the examples which I gave you. So this stands understood I believe. Another question which you can ask yourself is is communication really integrated and it really leverages the brand. This again is something which I already have explained with the help of the examples that I talked about. Another question is about the distribution and you will agree with me that I am talking about all those questions which basically stem from the elements or the steps of the brand management process. You are in the process of not only creating a brand but also managing it. You are going to make sure that if it is a new brand it must be managed in order for the brand to move itself the way it is being talked about. So the next question which must be considered within the workshop is do all the departments share understanding on all opportunities and risks. There are so many opportunities which the brand is going to offer and the brand is also going to be prone to various risks. Now if there is a complete understanding among all those who form that workshop then the blame game in terms of the finger pointing will not be done or will not be played because once things go wrong. This is not to say that things will go wrong but in case there are certain problems they will not be finger pointings in the head and there that I said so. I told you so. So those are the kind of things which you must avoid and must pre-empt by going through a process which is very comprehensive and which generates ownership on everybody's part in relation to the opportunities and the risks involved with this brand. It also harnesses the company's ability to fully capitalise and leverage the available opportunities. I mean if we talk just about opportunities it is not that they have an understanding only to avoid the blame game. It is because they also are going to be in a position to fully cash in on the opportunities which are there in the marketplace for the taking to leverage your brand. Another question which could be a very heavy weight question is about the core competencies. You have got to ask yourselves does the company really have the core competencies to be able to execute all which is being planned or which is going to be planned based on the brand model and the brand architecture. Because in this workshop you are talking about the communication which is going to take place in relation to the understanding that has already taken place among the members of the top management. Now this workshop is being conducted in order to make sure the kind of communication and the timing of the communication which is going to take place and before it takes place you are considering certain questions of very high strategic significance just to make sure that whatever you communicate is not wrong. What are core competencies? The core competencies basically in very plain terms relate to the quality of human resource having the ability to produce the right quality of the brand and then able to control costs and able to offer good margins to the company and keeping the company very different from the rest of the crowd. So in other words what these competencies relate are your competitive strength and the ability to retain that strength and to sustain that strength in other words and during the process the management has got to offer the company good margins and the good margins you will really recall either from commanding a good pricing point or from controlling costs. Now if you are commanding a good pricing point it doesn't really mean that you may go costs as high as they can go you still have to control your costs because only then you are going to be a quality management company. Company must make sure that they really can offer products with a decent level of differentiation. It can control costs. It must offer good margins and it can must be able to insulate itself from the competition. Not only that the company should be able to have core competencies, the company may also have what you must have learned from the course on strategic management what they call distinctive competencies. The meaning of the company must be able to do all those things much better than its rivals. So this is the approach which you have talked about within the workshop relating communication of the agreement among the top management. Having a complete understanding of the questions which the people within the workshop asked themselves and then came up with convincing answers. The agreement that you seek through this technique is called brand chartering. So in other words what you have done is through this workshop that you have created an agreement and then you see the same people who agreed upon those questions have given a charter meaning they have granted the company the permission so to say to go ahead with execution of the strategy which is being discussed and which is in the process of being crafted. That is what this technique does and it can be summed up as brand chartering. Through this charter you seek a consensus among all who are important within the company from various functions and then you start communicating that particular decision which is an extension of the primary decision which was taken in the very first meeting to all those who are going to be involved in execution of the strategies. So what you are going to do with the help of this internal communication is generate a sense of ownership and that sense of ownership is going to be very much cross functional. All the people who are part of the workshop belong to various functions and it is because of their linkages and because of their belonging to those particular functions that their people who report to them are going to own what you have discussed or what is going to be now communicated. With this our understanding relating the first part of the planning process comes to an end and this is something which is going to lay the foundation of the next step which you may call brand planning. Now do not be confused between this particular phase of the planning process because it is such that we end up calling it brand plan although it happens to be part of the overall three planning steps which I am talking about. So what is it that the brand planning consists of? Let us talk about those. First of all you have to have a very clear definition of the market. The first step that you must undertake to define your market is that you must define it from your customer's point of view. What this really means is that you have got to define it from the standpoint of needs meaning totality of needs which are being fulfilled within the market and this automatically means that you have got to talk about the competition and the various needs which are being fulfilled by all the major and the minor players who should be reckoned with. That is what it really boils down to. So in other words you are not to talk only about that particular need which you are going to fulfill in relation to one time frame or in relation to one particular purpose. What this really means could be explained with the help of an example.  So in other words you are dealing with a huge market which consists of not only cola drinks but all kinds of uncola drinks and juices and also I would say mineral water. So when you are defining this market you have got to define this market from that standpoint. The meaning you have got to talk about all the segments which form that market after you have created an understanding of the total market through writing then you get down to the segment which is of particular importance to you and you start talking about the understanding which took place in relation to that particular segment because that particular segment is going to lay the foundation for all the strategic considerations in terms of their executions for your brand. Those strategic considerations were of your choice because you discussed all that through the brand essence and through the brand model. So this is where you are going to relate to your segment in which you are going to operate with all other segments which form the total market. So what it is going to do not only for your own understanding but also for the understanding for all those who are going to lay their hands on this particular planning document that you will know and understand for all times to come what really was the basis of entering this particular market with certain set of strategic considerations. So this really confirms the legitimacy of your considerations and your brand chartering. Otherwise you are not really making good use of the charter which has been given to you to execute the strategies. You also like I said take into consideration all the competitors because you are dealing not only with your own segment but also with other segments and let me get the point out here that this process although is very exhaustive in terms of its analytical nature but when it comes to the coming up with a plan you are supposed to be putting all those analyses very precisely and very concisely as part of that planning document. While talking about the competition you have to talk about all the attributes which your competitors have. You must talk about the threatening postures of various competing brands which is the one which is your direct competitor and which is the one which is not very direct and what are the strengths and weaknesses and so on and so forth. You talk about all these things because you are going to relate all that with all those strategies which are going to flow out of all these considerations that you have put in place. There has got to be a total consistency of effort and that is the beauty of this planning process. You also should talk about the market growth factor because do not forget again that you are in the process of defining your market and toward that definition you started talking about the needs and their totality you talked about the need you are going to fulfill and you talked about the competitors who form that particular market and you also must talk about the growth factor meaning whether the market has been growing very fast or has been moving in a steady manner or maybe the market is declining. You never know that. So whatever life cycle stage you are dealing with in relation to your market you must talk about that because all these factors are going to have a very important bearing on your brand's movement. We are done with the first step of the planning process and the first step is about defining your market. The second step within this overall the planning process phase is what you may call market analysis. You have to analyze your market very thoroughly starting with your buyers and users. So in other words what I am talking about is that you must have complete understanding of who your buyers are and how they constitute the market in terms of demographics. You must know the who, why, when, where and what of your market and these are the points which I talked about and the great detail in one of the lectures at the very beginning of the course because when you know the who, why, when, where, what factors you generate a complete understanding of who those customers are and what quantities they buy and from there you develop a certain criteria on their part in terms of their buying habits and you also get to know how your brand or how your competitive brands are going to fit into their lives. Whether your brand and other brands just about fit into their lives in terms of performing certain basic questions or there are brands that offer the very emotional kind of values to their customers and what is it which you are going to be concerned with. So therefore you have got to analyze your market from all these points of view and that takes care of the who, where, why, when and what factors. You must also talk about your segment, the immediate segment which you are dealing with and then you must talk about the relationship which that segment may have with other segments of that particular market. The reason you talk about your own segment in the first place and about others in the second place and the third place is that you have got to develop all the relationships meaning all the possible relationships from the standpoint of getting into brand extensions at any given point in time. So in other words what you are doing is you are looking into the possibilities that they may be offered to you by the brand which you are talking about and which is the subject of planning at this particular moment and it is at this moment that you have got to be imaginative in terms of all those opportunities. Remember I talked about the opportunities and risks. The understanding about opportunities and risks is already there and it is an extension of that particular understanding that you look into the various segments from the standpoint of developing something different in months or years to come. You have got to be prepared for that. You also have to have the ability of changing trends. What are the trends that are creating the changes within the makeup of the different segments and what are the changing trends that may create the new segments in the near future? You have to have the ability to gauge the various trends which may have the potential of creating new segments or bringing about certain changes within the makeup of the existing segments. The ability to spot growth of new segments will keep you proactive and be preemptive in your strategic moves and will offer you the strength of competitiveness. It is very important on part of any of the brand managers to know their market to the extent that all the changing trends become known to them in a very clear way and therefore they should be in a position to see what are going to be the changes within this segment they are operating in and what are the new segments which are going to be created by those new trends and how they should be improving the level of preparedness and responding to those changes and then making moves for brand extensions or maybe new brands to serve those emerging trends. That is the basic concept and the basic first of the planning process that you must take into account while you analyze your market from the point of view of segmentation. Another factor which you must not ignore and you know that as much as I do is that of competition. Now I am going to talk about competition from the standpoint of market analysis. You have got to know the strengths of your competition and the level of threat in particular which each of them poses to your brand only because of the right assessment of the threat that you are going to be in a position to make the right moves about your brand. So in other words this is the part of the planning process in which you have to give as much importance to competition as you give to your customers. So in other words the competition and customers have got to be given an equal level of importance. You just cannot operate or plan in a vacuum.  So that is the reason you have to take the competition into account at this particular point of the planning process. The competitive advantages which your brand offers, you must list those one by one and the competitive advantages of your competitive brands which you think are offered to your competitors meaning by their respective brands also must be considered and studied so that you really know your strengths and weaknesses. In other words of your competition that's very important. Yet another factor that you have to put into the planning process and also in terms of the revision of the course it becomes very interesting is the channels from the standpoint of their structure and their makeup. For the meaning you've got to be very clear about what is the kind of channels best suited to your circumstances. Are you going to go through the market established norms or are you going to go for something which is very creative? Well in most of the cases the companies like to follow the market norm and that's the way it is. But in case you think you also can come up with something which is going to be creative and which is going to create a combination of the different sets of channels or different levels of channels and different forms and shapes of channels whether you should consider that and whether you should bring that into significance as part of your overall planning process. The objective here is to make sure that you as a company must be very efficient in reaching your customers and you also are cost-effective. The two very important lessons could be learned from the discussion on the channels of distribution. So with this objective in mind you've got to talk about those channels which are well suited to your objectives. The meaning you've got to be in a position to achieve your objectives. This is something which applies equally well to your tangible product brands and your service brands. So regardless of the distinction between the nature of two, you've got to undertake a good exercise relating to your channels. You will recall there are certain services which still need to be beefed up. They are the channels of distribution when we talk about those services in relation to the overall industry within our market and therefore you've got to talk about the channels of distribution which are best suited to your brands. May those be service brands or may those be a tangible product brands. Another important factor that you must talk about is the driving forces or the basic drivers. We've got to have a very good understanding of the basic drivers of change and the drivers of change in a market are known as the driving forces. Any market is subject to these drivers. There are certain drivers which are very strong and full of energy. The meaning they really cause some huge changes and there are drivers which are kind of dying because of the changing circumstances. But the fact is you've got to look into all those drivers which have the potential to cause changes and the changes which may affect your performance in terms of the achievement of objectives. The meaning in terms of executing your strategies. What are those drivers and what different shapes and forms they take. Let us talk about those one by one. It is very important for you to have a good level of understanding regarding these. The first one is the changes in long-term industry growth. Now this is one of the drivers which you have to take into account in relation to any industry that you are a part of. The shift in industrial growth upward or downward is a force that we must study and analyze. What is it that is causing that shift is what we call a driver. Let me explain this concept with the help of an example. The example relates the growth of the car market in Pakistan. What is it that is causing that growth? Meaning that shift. The reason we look into that because it really has a lot of repercussions for the manufacturers or for the brand managers because they have to cope up with the exploding demand and they have to cope up by either putting up additional plants. Meaning beefing up their capacities or by importing maybe built up models. Whatever they decide to do that is the repercussions of the shift that has taken place because of the driver. And the driver is causing that change. What is that driver? The driver is bank financing for example. It is because of the ease with which an average customer can go for a car. And the financial product which was basically created by banks offered to their customers who in turn are in a position to use that product to buy something that fulfills their needs and that is cars, that is electronics and that is so many other consumer durables. So what I am talking about the repercussions of the driver of growth you have got to take into account one driver or all those drivers which are pushing growth. Unless you take that into consideration your planning is going to be at odds with the objectives that you set to yourselves or else it is not going to offer you with all those opportunities which you must capitalize on in order to grow fast. The other driver which you must consider is the changes in who buys the product and how they use it. So in other words the repercussion of the changes in use of a certain product. I would like to explain this with the help of an example from the foods industry. Let us talk about a manufacturer who has just offered chicken portions. I mean ready to cook chicken portions as snacks that can be used at any time of the day. Maybe the customers could find the product so attractive and so useful that they start using that product as regular meals maybe as part of their breakfast, as part of their lunches and dinners. And the repercussion again is in terms of growth and growth has come about because of certain changes in the ways that people have started using that particular product. So if you are re-appraising with your brand you have got to take into consideration this particular driver. And even if you are in the process of launching a new brand you have got to take into consideration this factor because this is going to bring you not only at par but I would say this should place you in a position much better-padded than the one your competitors are. If they have learned something by making certain mistakes you must know that situation to your benefit and then fully capitalize on the situation by knowing the driver for that particular change. And that change is a driver. Let us now summarize whatever we have talked about within this lecture. I started talking about the planning process and told you that the process consists of three major parts. The first part is the corporate strategy and brands which basically relates to the treatment given to brands at the top most level and how a strategy gets translated into so many the various strategies and executions and so on and so forth. Basically it is about the support which a brand must get from the top level and the support is a major decision and that decision is then communicated to all concerned within the organization. The second step of the planning process is what you also call the planning process and that planning process consists of all elements that we have learned in relation to the whole course. The meaning, all those steps that are involved in managing and leveraging your brand. Starting with brand's vision to brand's positioning to brand's channels, communication, pricing, so on and so forth. And this step consists of so many different sub steps and in that relation I started talking about the need for defining the market and the second sub step is about the market analysis. I'm still in the process of talking about that but the while the time is running out so let us pick it up from where I'm leaving in the next lecture. Allah Hafiz until that time and thank you very much.


Hi, I'm Sid. I'm the CEO and co-founder at GitLab, and this is an AMA where team members at GitLab ask me preferably hard questions, and I try to answer them. Hey, Sid. Just wanted to get your thoughts on the early returns on the CEO shadow program and how that's, you know, living up to your expectations and what the plans are for that going forward. Yeah. Better than expectations so far. So the goal of the program is to make sure that people, more people at GitLab have kind of a global overview of the company and understand like how everything fits together. What's been ahead of expectations has been the collaboration with the executive team. Someone's mic is open who's typing. Executive team has, every single member has allowed the shadow to join their conversations and follow like 95, 98% of the conversations. So that's been really, really good. So they get a lot of access. It's also been very, it's been fun, like Erika published a blog post yesterday. You can read it about our COSLA visit. I thought it was an excellent output of it. Michael, who I'll give the word later, I was the current shadow. He, for example, yesterday he did a red team exercise and at six o'clock he was at a press event telling journalists about what he was doing and like representing the company in a very positive way. So it's it's been really good, but I want to give it to the word Michael a bit about how she what's it what's it like from his perspective. So from my perspective, it's been a great experience. This is what my third week with GitLab first week I, you know, you know, requested to be a part of the shadow program and the next week I was out. So it's been really exciting and very humbling. Overall, I feel like I've learned more in the last week on the shadow program and at GitLab alone with versus the last year or so in my previous position. I think that is also that's due and very, very highly because of the shadow program. It's kind of like, you know, I've already known I knew how to manage people, but now I'm observing Sid and his management style and how he solves problems with people. And I feel like every day it's I'm learning a lot more very rapidly. I'm starting to understand the reasons why there's certain management styles and ways you want to actually track things and build things. But overall it's been an excellent experience. I feel like I've grown leaps and bounds and I'm really looking forward to the next two weeks. So, yeah. Thanks, Michael. Next question is from Simon. Simon, you want to verbalize your question? Sure. So this the context for this is a customer, a large customer in EMEA asked about just some high level, instance-wide statistics about the code that they have in GitLab. And I just wondered if we could take it a step further and start looking at code analytics. The idea being customers have their code in GitLab. What actionable insights can we surf this to customers from the nature of that data? Yeah, thanks for that. And I'll screen share. This is the issue you refer to with code statistics. I have an opinion and I wrote that up three years ago, 2015, that was a busy year. But anyway, I think we should have great code analytics in GitLab. We should show a lot of things that are actionable. So it's always very important that when you have analytics, what is the action you take? So it should show code coverage, but also developer churn code hotspots, burn down charts, bus factors, test coverage, books for certain pieces of code, complexity, like cyclomatic complexity, code added in crunch time, how many people worked on something when things were modified, especially if you work with lots of contractors, these things are super, super useful. So I think those are things we should help our customers with. And I linked to the issue from the agenda. So just out of interest, just as a follow up, what's the main use cases for those analytics? Would you say is it around managing developer productivity? Would you say it's one? That's an excellent question. So you, for example, developer churn, you want to see, hey, which are the teams where many, many different people are touching the same piece of code? That probably means that you have a problem keeping people on the same project. So in some companies, developers are viewed as interchangeable. And they, depending on like the priority of that month, they work on a certain piece of code. With that, you get reduced stewardship of that piece of code. No one's really owning it. No one is responsible. No one is doing the final peer review. There is not one view in which it's made like one mental model. So you get like a spaghetti of many mental models. So it reduces the quality. So you want to preferably see not too much different developers doing it over time.  So that's the buzz factor. Like, hey, if there's a certain part of the code base where there's no other people, that's not a good sign as well, because that means that if one person leaves or is, has to do something else, suddenly nobody knows anymore. So you don't want it too high, don't want it too low. Code hotspots is where you see frequent changes. That's, that might be an indication that that piece of code is very complex and has it has too many responsibilities. So you want to reduce that maybe split that off or find another abstraction or use a DSL or things like that. Burn down charts, much more about like productivity. Like, are we getting enough done? Obviously, these are just indicators. So your lines of code are an indicator, but never use it as a final metric. Test coverage, the higher the test coverage, you assume it's more reliable. Issues open per key for pieces of code. Like if you have code, which has a lot of issues open for it, there's probably lots of bugs in it. And it's probably code you should consider refactoring. Cyclomatic complexity, the more complex, the harder to understand, you want to reduce that in general. Code added just before releases. That's like crunch time code, like that. There's something wrong that all of a sudden we have to fix this just before we do a release out. So and when pieces of code were modified, it's something you see when you have assignments where you have contractors on something for a month. You expect kind of changing that code over the month. If you only see it in the last week, probably something is going wrong in the process. It should be evenly distributed over the assigned period. If it's only happening in the last week, there's something holding them back from working on it earlier. And that's not a good thing. So thanks for the question. I hope this was insightful. Well, insightful. I hope this was useful. Definitely. Thank you.  What keeps you up at night in regards to GitLab? Yeah, thanks for that. I get a question a lot. So I'm starting to write it down, but I haven't done a good job of posting it to the handbook yet. So it's open here in my editor. Biggest fears. Scaling, lowering the hiring bar, onboarding, we have to onboard a lot of people and kind of extra layers of management. Lowering the hiring bar, what are we doing to prevent it? Reviewing new hires like bar raising. Now me and Carol are doing that. Comparing titles, making sure we have a good grip on the performance and we identify it early and we take action. I'm typing as we go because I have to get this into the leadership principles. Onboarding. So what's the onboarding time? How long does it take? Do people get productive quickly? Well, for developers, do they start contributing? And salespeople, do they ramp up? This is a misspelled value survey. I can spell. But do people think that our values are used to kind of promote people and give people bonuses? Extra layers of management like do have directly responsible individuals? Is there clear job family? Is there clear org chart? Is our open core model working? Is there velocity? What we're shipping? How many contributors do we have from the wider community? So those are the things I... Those are the biggest fears and what we're doing about them. If people think that there's different things I should focus on, feel free to speak up. Lyle, you want to verbalize your question? Yeah, sorry, I was in the middle of typing. I just wanted to talk about gitlab.com and in the handbook we have a thing that says gitlab.com is not a role. Do you think that's still working? Is gitlab.com sort of like the future of gitlab? And if it is, does it make sense to make gitlab.com a role? Yeah, I think that's still working. So the future of gitlab is gitlab. It may be a bit of Meltano. Gitlab.com is just a different way of delivering the same product. It's different packaging, should be the same product. And for example, like of what not to do, I saw a vault issue yesterday which said oh we'll have vault for gitlab.com but we won't add it to our self-managed installation. Okay, well the idea with vault is to make sure that people in gitlab have a secure... People using gitlab have a secure store for their secrets. Like you add lots of secrets to gitlab like Kubernetes credentials, environmental variables, all kinds of sensitive stuff that you want to be a very good steward of. If we ship it with gitlab.com but not with self-hosted gitlab, we cannot say hey everything that's sensitive in gitlab is going to go into or everything that's sensitive, everything that's a secret will go into vault because we get this split between the two products. So we really want to prevent that, I want to keep it. The same thing, just different packaging. Just like you can... I can get my hair gel, I can buy one packet at the drugstore or I can buy a six-pack at Costco. It's the same product, different way of delivering with different implications but if we start making them different products we get into a world of hurt and we've seen that at our competitors where changes take an extraordinary amount of time because we have two versions. We've seen that at gitlab, we got a CE and an EE distribution. We all know, well we all know it's a lot of pain. If you ask people in engineering they'll say yeah it's a lot of pain and we're now doing an enormous effort to bring the two code bases into one repository. That's how it is if you let them do different things, you'll end up with that inefficiency again and want to prevent that. We do expect that .com will grow over time. People want to consume software as a service, preferably they don't want to be running it and you're now seeing the first big customers there. Will that go all the way? I think that's unlikely. I think we'll always have people that host things themselves. With Kubernetes and those technologies it gets easier to self-host things and with new regulations there's more pressure to be a good steward of any data you produce as a company. There might be a movement where people take more things in-house. We shouldn't bet on any future. We should just make sure we have two great ways of distributing gitlab and anything we do like for example collecting feedback from our users should work the same way in both products. I guess sort of my concern here is that .com kind of breaks the model of self-managed where an admin user on .com doesn't have the same admin privileges. They can't do some of the same like some of the self-service things that they would expect to do on the self-managed version and so I'd like in the hair gel model it's sort of like you can have a squeeze hair gel or you can have like a pump. It's the same stuff inside but it is subtly different. I like the squeeze in the pump. Yeah I agree it's different and what we're seeing is that a lot of the things that we have on an instance level we're now adding on a group level and we're seeing that for example with any templates and in Kubernetes clusters with single sign-on with SAML. Historically we had most usage on self-managed so we added things first there and we're now adding the same things to .com and probably we're going towards a future where there's very few things that you can do self-managed that are still relevant for .com but you can't do there even though you'd like to. I think that's almost going away. I can't name any example where that's going to be a permanent future. John want to verbalize your question? Yeah I was just wondering if you're still receiving your CEO mentoring and if so what's some good advice you received recently maybe around scaling the company? Yeah I am the name is Dan Levin he's the old COO of Box he's an awesome person and the nice thing is that COSLA hired him just to do that and it comes with the COSLA package so we're not paying for it separately we're not paying for it at all like these people invest and help you obviously when they invest they get shares but it's pretty nice of COSLA to still be supporting us so many years later after the transaction and it's it's been really good What are you talking about? I think there's a to scale a company it's a lot about consistency so we talked about hey the process for updating job descriptions should be very clear. How do we do bonuses? What's the size of the bonus pool? How do we determine that? Do we give everyone the same or does it depend on the individual performance or not? Do we do yearly bonuses? Are we measuring if people on a PIP in 50% of the cases they should still be at the company after a year? We want to make sure that PIP performance improvement plans are not the end of the road but they are like survivable and you can be successful at the company afterwards. We dove into our termination numbers involuntary voluntary termination numbers. We looked at hey do we want to give everyone the same refresh or do we want to give half the people a refresh or do we want to do something on top for high performers? Promotions are the promotions evenly distributed throughout the company. What is the number it should be? Probably about 30% of the people in any year should get a promotion but it's very important that it's distributed evenly, that there's not so many managers making much easier to get one and some managers making it almost impossible. We reviewed my calendar and he noticed a few things. First of all I wasn't in a lot of staff meetings which is unusual but I see as a good thing because I don't want to be in people's hair too much but one thing that I did change is that I'm going to do skip level meetings. So I'm going to meet the reports of a manager without the manager present to hear what's going on in that department. He's going to maybe do a training program for GitLab and he's going to try to do that remote so that's great. Talent retention program, identifying high performance and things like that. So lots of things. All the things I talked about were just exploratory discussions like I am not announcing any compensation changes here on the call. It's just that we, composition is really important to get right and especially as we scale I want to make sure that I know what all the best practices are and I know what I want to learn from experience of people who did it really good at scale. I think I'm up next. You kind of hit on that and I think the term is actually skip level versus level down but I guess my question is what do you anticipate or what do you most want to get out of those? Yeah the term is skip level. Thanks for that Derek. I think there's a few things. First of all as the CEO you tend to be the last person to know like your information you get is filtered by many many layers before it reaches you. So I want to get a get a heads up if there's a problem in the company a bit earlier. Also it's a way to to kind of see whether there's there's something that that can be improved in the performance of the executive. So it's also a way to like hey how can I I'm the manager of the executive. I try to like give them feedback. This is what you can improve. This is what you should focus on but I don't have a whole lot. I haven't some input on how they're managing up but I don't have a whole lot of input of how they're managing down. So this is to get more input for like to help them coach them on the managing down. Cool thank you. Derek I think you have the next question as well. Uh that should be the same one. Ah so cool thanks for that. Those were all the questions. Thanks everyone for joining and have a great day.


Good day fellow investors! Today I'll discuss one of my favorite emerging markets, Brazil. I have been following Brazil for more than a few years now and there are very interesting developments going on that could lead to extremely positive future returns. So I'll discuss the economics, I'll discuss a few investing options and I'll make another two videos about two stocks that I really find interesting in Brazil at this moment. So please subscribe. The first thing I want to show you is that the Brazilian economic activity has started to turn around and we have seen 1% growth in the economy in the first quarter. Okay, 1% growth is not bad but why do I think really Brazil has the potential to do much more? What's very important is the balance of trade. The balance of trade shows you how much is the country exporting and how much it is importing. As you can see here Brazil has hugely positive exports. This means that more money is coming in and therefore the country will continue to grow, will receive benefits from exports and it's a very very positive strength sign for an economy. The country will get richer and richer in the future. Now what has been the issue in Brazil in the last few years? A very difficult political situation with the impeachment of the president. The current president is also accused of corruption so the political environment hasn't been of the best ones. However, the economics are getting much better despite of what's going on in the politics. We can see here inflation is falling, has been trimmed, now is around 3%. Which is an excellent result because 3% is a very good inflation rate and gives stability to the currency and gives stability to future investments. What's also very important is that economic growth was very negative in the past two years. The recession was deep with declines of 3.8% in 2015, 3.4% in 2016 and now the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund expect the economy to grow around 2% in 2018 and then for the long term. So the reversal that turned around is what can really give wings to Brazilian investments. So when an economy is really in a bad state and then turns around that's a great trend to be invested in and what's going on in Brazil with a positive balance of trade with commodities recovering a bit with inflation stabilizing the trend can be very strong and very very positive. So we have a good country, stable country, huge country, rich country that's getting richer and one of the most important benefits that is often overlooked by investors is the currency risk positive or negative when investing abroad. If we take a look at the Brazilian real versus the dollar we can see how it really depreciated in the last few years during the crisis and now it is around 3.3 Brazilian reais per dollar. When the economy will strengthen and that will be seen only in the next two years not immediately it's very probable that due to the exports and positive balance of trade the Brazilian currency strengthens and let's say that it drops down from the current 3.3 to around 2.5 Brazilian reais per dollar. So if the currency appreciates by 30 percent your investment even if nothing happens in your domestic currency goes up 30 percent. So for international diversification currencies are very very important and the best way to diversify internationally is to invest in countries when their currency is relatively cheap like it is in Brazil now lower inflation the economies just started to turn when the economy will be roaring at 2 percent then the currency will already be strong and then it's not a good time to invest in Brazil now it's a much better time to invest in Brazil especially US investors have to think about international diversification because here there is a long-term trend cyclicality of the dollar when the dollar is strong the economy isn't doing that well so we can see that the strong dollar doesn't last long and the trend is for the dollar to get weaker so that the economy can do better. 2011 the dollar was weaker now it's again strong there is a high probability that the dollar will continue with its cyclicality and get weaker in the future especially if there is a recession in the next few years and the Fed lowers interest rates again. So if you're a US investor you should look to diversify internationally now because your currency is strong in comparison to other currencies when the trend reverses your international investments will get a huge bonus from currency changes so think about that. All right now let's see what do we have on the Brazilian stock market I have analyzed companies that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange I find them very easy to analyze and they give lots of transparency so that's very important. Now we can see very different price earnings ratios going from 30 to just 5 the dividends yields go up to 5% and there are also companies that don't pay dividends so Ambev, Tsemic, CPFL, Embraer, Telefonica Brasil, Tim, ULTRAPAR are all relatively fairly priced however there are companies like ElectroBrush, Copeo, Sebast, Vale and some banks that have really low price earnings ratios below 10 so giving that the economy is recovering we don't know when will the international market recognize Brazil as a gem again so we want a low price earnings ratio and a good dividend to reward you while you wait and if there is a currency change then the dividend even if it's the same in Brazilian reals will be just higher and higher for you the Brazilian market is still very cheap check the Brazilian ETF it's 77% below its 2007 peak and 60% below its 2010 peak as the economic recovery is not yet recognized by the market the market is usually very slow when things get going when the growth is confirmed in Brazil the stock prices should also increase accordingly and I wouldn't be surprised if the Brazilian ETF hits the peaks reached in 2010 and 2007 so the problem or opportunity however do you see it is in the fact that the market hasn't yet warmed to Brazil because they are still thinking about the political issues high inflation that has been but things have changed so you can see the ETF is still low so the market didn't recognize that so now it's a good time to invest to catch the upward trend however I wouldn't invest in an ETF because ETFs invest by looking just at market capitalization and if we look at what the Brazilian ETF highly skewed towards financials the fairly priced consumer staple petrobras energy so really if you want to invest it would be much better to find few stocks three four stocks or two three that are a good match to your portfolio and I'll be discussing a few of them so be sure to subscribe as a video about some utilities and some real estate companies will come up soon Brazil economic recovery cheap stocks low valuations high dividends positive balance of trade huge rich country what do you want more thank you for watching be sure to subscribe click like comment share your thoughts if someone from Brazil has an interesting idea please write it down and I look forward to seeing you in the next video


A Pine River man is being compared to the Grinch while he's behind bars after allegedly stealing mail and packages on Christmas Eve. According to the Crow Wing County Sheriff's Office, 32 year old Owen Swenson was arrested Sunday and charged with 14 counts of mail theft along with a probation violation. The investigation started late Sunday afternoon when authorities received a notice of a house alarm in the 8,000 block of the Whitefish Narrows in Ideal Township. Police were investigating an apparent burglary when a Crosslake officer reported that he was out with a vehicle on County Road 1 and had identified the driver as Swenson. A large amount of mail that was addressed to several different people in the area was found inside the car. Police believe Swenson had stolen mail out of numerous mailboxes along with packages that had been delivered to different homes. Investigators believe Swenson had stolen mail in the Kego Lake Road area along with homes in the County Road 134 area as well as other side roads. The Crow Wing County Sheriff's Office is asking people living in this area who believe they may be missing packages or mail to contact their office at<PHONE_NUMBER> and then ask for investigations. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.