About Mattermost (90%)
Mattermost, Inc. is a company based on the Mattermost open source project. Mattermost software is used by thousands of organizations around the world in 16 languages.
Mission
Our mission is to make the world more safe and productive by developing and delivering secure, open source collaboration software that is trusted, flexible and offers fast time-to-value.
Leadership Principles
Leadership principles are deliberate choices defining our behavior. When facing complexity, uncertainty, or ambiguity (CUA) we determine our point of view and our actions through the lens of our values:
Customer Obsession: We exist to make customers successful. In everything we do, start with customer perspective and work backwards. Earn and keep their trust.
Ownership: Own the outcomes of your activity. Don’t drop the ball. When we see a vacuum on something important, we jump in – we never say “it’s not my job.”
High Impact: Align work to our shared vision and focus on those priorities. When deciding to work on low impact or high impact projects, choose high impact.
Self-Awareness: We understand and seek to understand our strengths and growth opportunities, as individuals and organizations. We are open to critique and share critique constructively and respectfully.
Earn Trust: Make decisions based on maximizing the trust of others in your judgement. Be open, self-critical, and factual. Earn and keep people’s trust.
Products and Business Model
Mattermost, Inc is a commercial open source company with a subscription-based, buyer-based open core licensing model.
Mattermost Team Edition
Audience:
Development team that wants to self-host workplace messaging in private network.
Our core product is Mattermost Team Edition offered under an open source MIT license. It’s built for a team of 10 to 50 developers and IT professionals who need to self-host a workplace messaging platform. Developer-focused features including web, desktop, and mobile apps as well as core integrations with DevOps platforms, archiving, search, and extensibility framework are offered in the open soure core at no cost.
Mattermost Team Edition is packaged as a single Linux binary that’s straightforward to install and maintain, with automated deployment from public cloud marketplaces including AWS, Azure, VMWare, and GCP.
Mattermost Enterprise Edition
Audience:
IT organization needing to self-host workplace messaging in private network for multiple development teams, or other end users in high trust environments.
Mattermost Enterprise Edition is an extended version of Mattermost Team Edition offered under a proprietary license priced with a user-based annual subscription. It offers features designed for IT organizations to manage multiple teams of developers and other end users in high trust environments with Single Sign-on, Active Directory/LDAP integration, eDiscovery support, and High Availability deployment configurations.
Different packages of commercial features are offered based on buyer needs.
For more information, see our Product Overview and open source repository at https://github.com/mattermost/.
Company
Mattermost is an open source, remote-first, communities-centered company based in Palo Alto, California and headquartered on the internet.
Open source means that by default we make our technology, business process and source code available to the public. We develop a small portion as proprietary technology, built upon our open source work, to license for subscription fees that enable more high quality open source work to be produced. Since the start of the Mattermost open source project in 2015, we have used this model to develop effective open source solutions for the world to use. This model is sometimes called Thin Open Core.
Remote-first means that the majority of our staff works from home, cottages, coffee shops, and other personal areas rather than at a shared corporate office location. Mattermost was born in an extraordinary age where remote-first organizations can attract, hire and enable remote teams to produce better technology, business process and business results in less time than office-based teams, while maintaining security and compliance standards.
Remote-first culture flourishes when we share one simple principle: Courtesy. Courtesy means Mattermosters are thoughtful about keeping our communities appropriately informed, following etiquette for discussions, calls and video meetings, and giving and receiving feedback on how to work better together. Courtesy also means we gladly accommodate those who prefer to work out of a dedicated office. We are remote-first, not remote-only.
Communities-centered means we define our success in the context of the success of our communities: users, customers, implementers, resellers, technology partners, contributors, and colleagues. The success of each community is owned by a member of the Mattermost leadership team. The plural definition of “communities” is intended to avoid unconsciously marginalizing downstream stakeholders.
Based in Palo Alto, California and headquartered on the internet means the mailing address for Mattermost, Inc. is in Palo Alto, California, and our headquarters is on the internet, specifically the production-quality Mattermost instance at https://community.mattermost.com. Our online headquarters is where Mattermost staff work with our communities of colleagues, users, partners, customers, candidates, contributors, and other community members to envision, develop, and refine new open source technologies to make the world safer and more productive.
Mindsets
NOTE: This section is currently being imported from: https://docs.mattermost.com/process/training.html#mindsets
Mindsets are “tool sets for the mind” that help us find blindspots and increase performance in specific situations. They’re a reflection of our shared learnings and culture in the Mattermost community and at Mattermost Inc.
To make the most out of mindsets, remember:
Mindsets are tools: Use common sense to find the right mindset for your situation. Avoid using ones that don’t fit.
Mindsets are temporary: Try on a mindset the way you’d try a tool. You can always put it down if it doesn’t work.
Mindsets are not laws: Mindsets are situation-specific, not universal. Don’t use them to debate.
When you read about great leaders, they share mindsets relevant to success in their specific situations, which differ from their peers. Remember that “advice is personal experience generalized” so be mindful about what you apply.
In this context, here are mindsets for Mattermost:
Learn, Master, Teach
Learn a new topic quickly, develop mastery (be the smartest person at the team/company/community on the topic), then teach it to someone who will start the cycle over.
If you’re a strong teacher, their mastery should surpass yours. This mindset helps us constantly grow and rotate into new roles, while preventing “single-points of failure” where only one person is qualified for a certain task.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
When you rush to get something done quickly, it can actually increase the time and cost for the project.
Rushing means a higher chance of missing things that need to be done, and the cost of doing them later is significantly higher because you have to re-create your original setup to add on the work.
Emotion, Assumption, and Priority
Consider when two rational people disagree, the cause often comes from one of three areas:
Emotion: There could be an emotion biasing the discussion. Just asking if this might be the case can clear the issue. It’s okay to have emotions. We are humans, not robots.
Assumption: People may have different underlying assumptions (including definitions). Try to understand each other’s assumptions and get to agreement or facts when you can.
Priorities: Finally, people can have different priorities. When everyone’s priorities are shared and understood it’s easier to find solutions that satisfy everyone’s criteria.
While the emotions, assumptions, priority mindset won’t work for everyone in every case, it’s helped resolve complex decisions in our company’s history.
Likes and Wishes
An easy way to check in with team members about how things are going.
What do you like about how things are going?
What do you wish we might change?
Use these one-on-one or in a group as a way to open conversations about what to keep and what to change in how we do things.
Drafts at 1%, 50%, 99%
Being clear on expectations when asking for someone’s review can help speed and smooth the process. In this mindset, there are three types of review:
1% Draft - Completely open to ideas and changes in direction. Rework is inexpensive.
50% Draft - Half complete work. There is structure, but also a lot of room for change. Some rework is inexpensive, some is expensive.
99% Draft - Nearly completed work. Rework at this point is very expensive.
Shoulder Check
When a new owner takes over a process or a project from a previous owner, there are a finite number of “blindspots” of which the original owner is aware and the new owner will need to understand.
Using the analogy of changing lanes while driving a vehicle and learning to do a “shoulder check” for information that is not visible from standard controls, we have a process for the new owner and previous owner to jointly review processes until the transfer is complete.
This process is similar to Mini-boss, End-boss, except that the mini-boss is also the new owner of a process, and not only a reviewer. Shoulder checks should be requested by new owners to avoid “crashing”:
Making changes to systems that break existing processes and may lose data and hurt the productivity of others downstream without notice and without a replacement system in place (behavior known as “Dead Tarzan”).
Repeatedly investing in mis-prioritized projects due to a misunderstanding of requirements from project stakeholders and insufficient confirmation of intended outcomes.
Even when not crashing, as part of our Self Awareness value, top team members will constantly be seeking feedback and review from people around the company.
Brown M&Ms
A “brown M&M” is a mistake that could either signal dangerous oversights in the execution of a project, or be a completely innocuous and unimportant error. When a brown M&M is found, aim to rule out a dangerous error as quickly as possible. Do fast drilldowns and systematic checks to see if more brown M&Ms are found, and if so, an entire project may need to be reviewed.
Examples of brown M&Ms may include:
Significant mistakes in process, consistency, or documentation suggesting lack of review or lack of understanding of the pre-existing system.
Ambiguous definitions that would make completion of a procedure difficult or unpredictable.
The name brown M&M comes from a safety technique used by the American music band Van Halen, who had to set up large, complex concert stages in third tier cities, where few local workers had experience with the safety standards vital to construction. In the contract rider with each venue, Van Halen required a bowl of M&M candies with all brown M&Ms removed. Failure to provide the bowl was grounds for Van Halen’s stage crew to inspect all of the local vendor’s work for safety issues, because it meant the vendor had not paid attention to detail, and safety could be at risk.
Correct Minimums: Medic, Field Surgeon, Plastic Surgeon
When making project investment decisions, we optimize for high impact in the context of customer obsession, empowered by ownership, while being constrained by “be proud of what you build”.
The failure case is over-investing in processes and infrastructure, stealing mana from higher priority work, reducing speed and agility for the company and unnecessarily increasing cost and bureacracy.
The objective of optimization is to invest at minimal levels for efficiency and safety while maximizing impact.
In making these trade-offs, consider the following mindsets:
Correct Minimum 1: Medic
Safely fix something that is important, broken and dangerous as fast as possible. Speed is critical - do not worry about “leaving a scar” in our architecture or business process, just own it and get it done. Solve the problem, do not overbuild.
Example: Something incorrect on our public website with more than 100 page views a month should be fixed immediately and not delayed to be done with a longer term project, such as a website re-design. If the staging server cannot be pushed, this means manually fixing production and duplicating that change on staging, rather than trying to fix staging.
Correct Minimum 2: Field Surgeon
Triage tasks that are important and broken but not dangerous, and fix the most important things with a minimum time and cost. Scarring should be a low-priority consideration–it is fine to leave scars and it is fine to spend a little energy to avoid big ones. Solve the problem for the next stage of growth, but don’t solve it in two to three stages ahead.
Example: In Mattermost, spend 2 mana to enable automated messages over 4000 characters to be broken into multiple posts instead of being rejected, which is a problem every developer hits when they attempt to output log information via curl commands.
Correct Minimum 3: Plastic Surgeon
Fix and optimize critical, high volume flows in our customer experience and product with heavy investment if needed to make high impact changes. Scars can be avoided and removed to produce a high impact result.
Example: Click-tracking traffic on about.mattermost.com and optimizing flows to direct visitors to learn about the product and downloading it is a flow that should be continually optimized.
Mini-boss, End-boss
After completing the initial draft of a project, there may often be more than one reviewer to approve changes. This may be for different disciplines to review the work (for example, both development and design teams reviewing code changes to the user experience) and it may also be for reviewers with different levels of experience to share feedback.
When reviewing significant user interface changes, code changes, responses to community or customers, or changes to systems or marketing material changes, it is ideal to have at least two reviewers:
Mini-boss: Reviewer less experienced in domain or Mattermost standards for the first review.
End-boss: Reviewer more experienced in domain or Mattermost standards for the final review for the discipline (e.g. development, design, documentation, etc.).
This system has several benefits:
The Mini-boss provides feedback on the most obvious issues, allowing the End-boss to focus on nuanced issues the Mini-boss didn’t find.
The Mini-boss learns from the End-boss feedback, understanding what was missed, and becoming a better reviewer.
Eventually the Mini-boss will be as skilled at reviewing as the End-boss, who will have nothing futher to add after the Mini-boss review. At this point, the Mini-boss becomes an End-boss, ready to train a new Mini-boss.
The naming of this term comes from video games, where a person submitting material for review must pass a “mini-boss” challenge before a “end-boss” challenge for different disciplines.
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