Professional development

Professional development tracks

This page outlines professional development tracks available to all product team members (Product Managers, Product Designers, Technical Writers, and Product Analytics Engineers).

The courses listed below are suggestions and not all have been validated. Some topics do not currently have a suggested course yet. If you take a class that is useful, please consider adding it to this list.

Objective

1. Provide different professional development tracks that employees can use to grow their skills based on areas that are interesting to them in their career journeys.

2. Within the tracks, be more prescriptive on how to spend the budget, so there are less barriers for employees to use the budget on professional development.

3. Provide a process in which employees can be accountable for their own development and foster an environment of sharing their learnings.

Programs

Mattermost provides a Professional Development allotment of $500 to all staff. After Org 360 feedback conducted and shared in the 5/19/2021 Customer Obsession meeting, the product org increased professional development budget and professional development track, thereby increasing our investment in career development as employees grow with Mattermost.

Below are the various track discovered following research and discussions with product stakeholders. If you do not find a track or program of interest to you, please speak to your manager! We aim to be flexible in providing the right professional development that suits your interest and career progression.

Technical Excellence Upleveler

• Recommended for: Employees with 2+ years of tenure at Mattermost.

• Track focus and outcomes: With a solid foundation in your functional area and of Mattermost Practices, employees are empowered to take courses to deepen their technical acumen in an area of interest. This may be to build deeper skills in an area they are already familiar with or in a new technical area they are not. The goal is to expand their knowledge on a technical topic that will improve their functional area and grow their professional skills portfolio.

• Additional $3000 professional development budget for:

  • Functional training courses

  • Professional certifications

  • Subscription to trade publications or groups

  • Udacity Courses offer specific training programs over multiple weeks

  • Codecademy.com offers specific training course in programming

Aspiring Mattermost Leader

• Recommended for: Employees with 3+ years of tenure at Mattermost.

• Track Focus and Outcomes: Employees are empowered to uplevel their leadership skills to help them become more effective communicators, public speakers, and influencers. Deeply understand how leadership principles build alignment, best practices on how to apply the Leadership principles to your daily work in practice and in communication.

  • Book: Leading without Authority
  • Pluralsight course: Technical Leadership 101: CodeMash
  • Pluralsight course: Managing Conflict Best Practices
  • Pluralsight course: Becoming a Change Leader
  • Pluralsight course: Leading Change: The Head, Heart & Hands Approach
  • PluralSight course: Leading with Emotional Intelligence
  • Customer obsessed
  • Ownership

    • PluralSight course: Culture of Learning: Executive Briefing
  • High impact

  • Self-awareness

    • PluralSight course: Leadership Guide for the Reluctant Leader
    • PluralSight course: Leadership for Non-managers
  • Earn Trust

    • PluralSight course: Building Trust and Commitment on Your Team

Agile Practitioner Aficionado

• Recommended for: Employees with 1+ years of tenure at Mattermost.

• Track focus and outcomes: Employees deepend how to be more agile, lean, data driven, and innovative.

  • PluralSight course: Understanding Lean and Value-driven Delivery
  • PluralSight course: Exploring Iterating Product Experiences
  • Coursera course: Innovation Through Design: Think, Make, Break, Repeat

Communication Ninja

• Recommended for: Employees with 1+ years of tenure at Mattermost.

• Track focus and outcomes: Employees are empowered to uplevel their written and speaking communication skills to help them become more effective communicators, public speakers, and influencers.

  • PluralSight course: Understanding Your Audience
  • PluralSight course: Writing in the Workplace: Email, Memos, Reports, and Social Messaging
  • PluralSight course: How to Have Difficult Conversations
  • PluralSight course: Visual Communication: Creating Engaging and Effective Technical Diagrams

Community Steward

• Recommended for: Employees with 1+ years of tenure at Mattermost.

• Track focus and outcomes: Our community is one of our Mattermost super powers. Learn more about the benefits of the community, how to make our community more inclusive, and how you can get more involved.

  • How to leverage community more

  • Marketing

  • Community

  • Become a mentor

  • Organization & influence & motivating others

  • Books:

    • The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success
  • Courses:

    • Linux Foundation class: Inclusive Open Source Community Orientation
    • Linux Foundation class: Fundamentals of Professional Open Source Management
    • PluralSight course: How the Open Source Way Promotes Creativity and Innovation
    • PluralSight course: Understanding and Counteracting Conscious and Unconscious Bias
    • PluralSight course: Fostering a Diverse and Inclusive Culture
    • PluralSight course: Get Involved!
  • Free learning resources:

    • https://opensource.guide/
    • Article on mentorship

Business SuperStar

• Recommended for: Employees with 2+ years of tenure at Mattermost.

• Track focus and outcomes: Employees are empowered to deepen their understanding of running a business and the other functions that drive business success.

  • Finance 101

  • Selling

  • Marketing

  • User research

  • Data Driven Decision Making

  • Pluralsight course: Empowering People to Unleash the Potential of Data: The Case for Data Literacy
  • Pluralsight course: Using Negotiating Techniques to Reach Agreements
  • Pluralsight course: Building Vendor Relationships That Work

Inspired by: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/impressive-professional-development-benefits-from-amazon-google-microsoft-and-more/

Online courses:

• Coursera
• Skillshare
• Udacity
• LinkedIn Learning
• Masterclass

• Pluralsight
• Codecademy

Additional reading and resources

Developers

• Code Complete, Steve McConnell - Best practices and guidelines for writing high quality code.
• Design Patterns, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides (aka "Group of Four") - Fundamental reading on design patterns. Other design pattern books work too, this is one of the most popular.

Product management

Courses

• Harvard Business School PM 101

Software strategy

• Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) - Required reading for business roles.

System security

Papers and Course Materials

• Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. National Institute of Standards and Technology - Standards for internal Mattermost security processes and safeguards.
• Computer Security in the Real World. Butler Lampson - Fundamental challenges with system security.
• Course notes from CS513: System Security (Cornell University). Fred B. Schneider - Well written introduction to system security from one of the leaders in the field.

Additional training resources

• This chart outlines training materials by category. You can ignore the P1, P2, P3 priority ratings as these have been deprecated.
• This table summarizes abbreviations used in the above link.