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Matter โ Take control of your career. Peer feedback for professionals
Matter is for professionals who want to become the best version of themselves. Discover your strengths and reach your aspirations.
๐ Thanks for taking the time to learn about Matter.
๐ฃWe'd love to hear from you below.
Get started ๐ Visit Matter
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@marcreisen yea! we're live ๐ก nothing like a little public team PDA. And a special thanks to @jw for introducing us to @Figma ... @zoink
Hey @bretthellman @marcreisen and @mechanical_turk! I'd love to hear more about how you all are using Figma and its benefits when working in a small team, especially for handoffs between design and engineering. We currently use it at my company and it definitely has it's pros/cons and requires a different approach compared to workflows like Sketch + Abstract, so I'd love to hear your take on it.
@parkerhendo The engineering experience on Figma has been really nice to be honest. As a simple engineer who doesn't have a background in product or design, I find it really helpful to see exactly what I need to build. Usually what happens is our founder @bretthellman teams up with our design lead @marcreisen to create a concept. Then marc takes over and starts his design iterations. Over the course of a few days, a feature gets ironed out through non-stop feedback. Finally, marc adds the polish and makes it beautiful. We'll usually have read access to the documents from the beginning of the ideation phase. This makes it easier to develop the feature as a team. Once marc showcases the final designs, we take them over and start building. 80% of the feature is really easy to follow from Figma. I usually never have to bother marc. For the remaining 20% though, while building the designs, new issues arise inevitably. We usually discuss them on person or via Slack. The end result usually sticks about 95% true to the designs on figma.
Overall, as a read-only engineer user of Figma, I'll say that it makes my job easier for sure. It's a really good product.
@marcreisen @mechanical_turk @parkerhendo I feel like FIGMA should be paying me at this point ๐ In terms of how we used @Figma to create Matter, the only thing I could add is the value of using their commenting tool. It's a nice way to collaborate around feedback while keeping track of what is open/closed. It's also nice having the commenting inline with document vs outside of the design on a @trello board.
@marcreisen @mechanical_turk @figma @trello @bretthellman Commenting is definitely one of my favorite features in Figma, even for adding personal notes on thoughts through my designs!
Hey PH ๐๐
After a year in closed beta, weโre excited to open up Matter to everyone.
We believe:
๐ Peer feedback is the silver bullet to reaching your aspirations.
๐ฉโ๐ฌ People perform better when they hear monthly peer feedback (proven by science too!).
๐งโโ๏ธ Everyone deserves the opportunity to achieve mastery, learn, grow, and be respected by their peers.
โจ Matter makes feedback easier, pleasant, and more productive. โจ
How do we know? Because our customers told us!
"The app is amazing. Everything about it, from the interface to the way in which I am able to send and receive feedback is amazing." - Product Manager at Dribbble
"Matter is an empathetic experience which directly speaks to your heart, connecting yourself to your peers and driving betterment." - Designer at Adobe
"As knowledge workers, we are paid to use our brains. We spend too little time improving how our brains work. Matter is an incredibly powerful way to grow your skills." - Product Leader at Airbnb
๐ฌ If you have any questions, just reply โ the team is around all day!
Thank you for joining us!
๐ฉ๐ปโ๐จ๐จ๐พโ๐งโโ๐ฉโ๐คโโ๐จ๐ผโ๐ฌโโ๐ง๐ฝโโ๐ผ
P.S.: A special thanks to:
@mechanical_turk for being employee #1.
@jw for all his design genius.
@marcreisen for joining me for another startup adventure.
Brian Brasher for his amazing skill badge illustrations.
My Mom! I couldnโt have done anything w/o her.
Hi everyone! This is Kerem Kazan ( @MechanicalKazan), founding engineer @Matter_HQ. Iโm here to shed some light on questions coming from the engineers among you. Here's a brief overview of how we built Matter:
Matter is a web app, written in NodeJS. For about 50% of our app, we use ES6 and compile it down via Babel. The more recent parts of our app is written in TypeScript, and we are in the process of migrating the rest to TypeScript as well. We also depend heavily on eslint & tslint for a consistent code style. We have a fairly large code base, with 9 standalone packages that together comprise Matter. We use yarn workspaces to orchestrate how these packages depend on each other.
If I had to break down our app into its most fundamental parts, weโd have 4 sections:
a) @matterapp/matter-ui: Our frontend component library. Written in React, developed with Storybook. We use styled-components along with grid-styled to manage our css.
b) @matterapp/web-client: Our web appโs frontend code. At its core, itโs a create-react-app project. It combines and composes the components in @matterapp/matter-ui. We use Redux for local state management, and Redux-form for our forms. We use Recompose for maintaining our higher order components. Also, ReactRouter for client-side routing. For remote state management, we use apollo-client. All of our user-facing api is written in GraphQL, (and yes, itโs been amazing). We use CypressJS for automated end-to-end testing of our entire app.
c) @matterapp/graphql-server: Our web appโs user facing api server. At the bottom of the stack, we have Koa. Our Koa server connects to our MariaDB sql database via KnexJS & Objection. Weโre in the process of picking another ORM, (something more typescript friendly). Weโll either go with TypeORM or Sequelize-Typescript. Our server has one endpoint for user-facing api calls, and thatโs our GraphQL endpoint. Because Matter needs a bunch of 3rd party integrations, we also use Grant for OAuth solutions. Authentication is handled via the beloved jsonwebtoken library.
d) @matterapp/lambdas: Our background jobs system. We use serverless-framework to interface with aws. This coebase is written purely in TypeScript. The users never directly invoke calls on this part of our stack. This is strictly for background jobs like batch processes or cron jobs. Usually, our graphql-server puts something to an SQS queue, and the lambdas pick it up. Sometimes the graphql-server sends direct api-calls via api-gateway. We use inversify-js on our lambdas for inversion of control.
So, there you have it :) A brief overview of Matterโs tech stack. Let us know what you think. Feel free to give some feedback, ask questions, or provide criticism. Looking forward to learning from you!
@philmil22637493 ๐ค great question. I defer to Kerem to share why Cypress specifically.
I will say from a product leader perspective, @cypress_io has been lightyears better than my previous experiences w Selenium.
If you love JavaScript you should try it out.
OK, back to promoting my own product now ๐
@philmil22637493 cypress is a relatively new player in the end-to-end testing arena. however, they are surprisingly robust, and very responsive. Every now and then, we run into issues with their library, but they are almost never slow to respond. I think they secured a big funding recently as well. Give them a shot, it's been really nice for us.
@mechanicalkazan @matter_hq @matterapp @mechanical_turk What was your reasoning for switching to Typescript? I've been trying it myself, but I feel like it slows me down quite a bit in comparison to vanilla ES6.
@parkerhendo in my opinion, for early prototypes and small projects, using vanilla JS is the way to go. that's actually what we did here at Matter. So I would agree with your comment that it slows you down. However, we found that there was a good point over the lifespan of a software project where that slowdown is actually worth it.
The value of strongly-typed languages, such as TypeScript, comes right around when a project stops being a small prototype, and the number of people working on it starts to increase. A really high percentage of software bugs (I believe about 80%, but dont quote me on this) come from type errors. A strongly typed language can catch those errors at compile time, which will immediately eliminate a huge pain point, just like that.
The tradeoff here, is that you have an initial fixed cost when you are establishing your type system. However, that small investment pays big time over the lifespan of a project. In fact, having types, combined with smart editors that auto-complete your code via suggestions, will definitely make it faster to develop over time.
Finally, types address one of the biggest coding problems: communicating developer intent. A smart and concise type name can help a team of developers quickly understand what they are working on. When we stop coding solo, and start collaborating with others, programming becomes a whole different game. At that point, anything that makes communication easier is worth a try.
Hope you find this useful @parkerhendo. Thanks so much for asking these really intriguing & engaging questions. I honestly really appreciate your involvement both here and on twitter. Please let me know if I can help answer any other questions. All the best
Individuals are notoriously inaccurate at self-evaluation - we regularly over- and under-estimate how we're doing on professionally-relevant skills. The best way to keep a pulse on how we're doing is to get feedback from peers and colleagues. Up until now, this has been hard to come by - there really haven't been any good means by which to collect professional feedback on an ongoing basis. Matter makes it easy (really couldn't be easier) to send out a quick request for feedback (no lengthy surveys that will bother your supervisors or peers) that will help individuals identify strengths and weaknesses. Tracking progress over time is easy too - these are exactly the types of assessments that can be done repeatedly to provide information about whether you're reaching your goals. Great idea, great product!
Pros:Makes it easy to get VALUABLE and MEANINGFUL professional feedback. Excited to use this on a regular basis to track my progress.
Cons:Nothing yet, though I am excited for more customization options
Thank you for the wonderful comment @droubinov It's true that we as individuals can improve our abilities to more accurately self-evaluate. Thank you for trying out Matter, and sharing your expertise! ๐
Matter has a simple, effective way at capturing genuine feedback. As they continue to evolve, I'm looking forward to seeing the ways they will innovate on how to give constructive critique to colleagues.
Pros:Matter helps solicit genuine feedback from people you've worked with.
Cons:None.
Really wonderful to have you on Matter with us @jdsimcoe Thank you for sharing your feedback, and being an active participant in our feedback process. We appreciate you. ๐
6 months ago I joined the private beta release of Matter and have been using Matter ever since. I HIGHLY recommend you trying matter.
The work the team (small at that) has done on the product over the last few months is remarkable. Matter makes me feel more confident at work. Matter makes me happy. Great work, can't wait to see where Matter goes next.
Pros:Matter has a friendly, easy to use, user interface
Cons:My company doesn't use Matter, yet!
Thanks for your support and being an early beta user on Matter @ben_koehler We appreciate your support in helping us become more confident as a team of product lovers! ๐
@parkerhendo Really good question re: Figma. I'm moving it out here to the main thread for all ๐to see. I didn't know Figma prior to joining the team. I still spent my time in Sketch. There was a point where I didn't want to learn a new tool, as it was slowing down my workflow. However as a co-located team. We all sit in the same space, and yet do not fully utilize Figma in a distributed setting. But, that being said, I enjoy Figma and have no plans on going back.
One amazing use case recently which was magical, was making our assets, design system and color system available externally to a 3rd party team. We were able to create a new Team, copy our assets over. Add members and they were instantly integrated into our vector, SVG assets. In the past, this would have been done via Dropbox, e.g. creating a folder, exporting assets, uploading them, etc....with Figma being in the cloud. Your assets area already there. Not too mention the fact that I dont have to SAVE anymore.
My favorite features are the ability to comment, the pen tool, and how well the design system integrates across your files.
Thank you @jw for creating such an incredible design system for us.
@marcreisen Thanks for the quick response! We're at a similar size here at TTYL and have been recently discussing if we want to stay with Figma or switch to Sketch + Abstract before we get too invested. I've still yet to dive into the shared libraries in Figma, but it definitely seems easier and less of a hassle then the old Dropbox way of sharing assets!
Is there anything from Sketch or another tool that you miss when using Figma? It's definitely taken me a bit to get used to not having some plugins that I relied on when using Sketch.
How do you make sure engineers are only getting the latest design assets, do you have a "Master" file or page?
@parkerhendo really great questions:
A couple things I have learned. Design is never done, including in the files. One thing that helps with versioning is; I keep working files to myself and private, this helps to alleviate confusion as well as distractions. When that file is ready for engineering/dev I simply create a new file in a shared project. This helps on a few things, one file becomes the source of truth and all of my ideas that end up not going anywhere or being used, dont confuse the team.
I never really got into the plugins on Sketch. At Atlassian we used quite a few for versioning and locking files. This was systemic of the fact that someone would download the sketch file from Dropbox then make changes to the master and save it to the master. They're some really great plugins built by talented people, but that in itself is trying to solve larger issues that I see Figma already solving.
You should absolutely look into using the shared libraries, it took some time to get used to, but it really speeds up the work!
@marcreisen Do you ever feel that your files become unorganized and cluttered? One of my favorite things that Sketch+Abstract enforced was keeping files small and organized which I found helpful in a collaborative environment. However, it did effect speed and required an extra step that the traditional way of organizing documents and is much more time consuming then Figma which doesn't require any sort of saving/versioning at all.
@parkerhendo I do miss the organization, especially when it comes to the simple drop down menus and organization of symbols in Sketch. Figma has alternatives to this.
As our work continues to grow, and thus our design inventory will as well, I can see the need for search, nomenclature, and file organization becoming something we should definitely keep an eye on.
hey @marcreisen -- I loved using the product to get feedback from my team during the beta and I'm so excited to see it fully launch, congrats! What was your biggest learning from the closed beta, and what are you excited about for 2019?
@marcreisen @matt_edelman such a great question and thank you for all the support during Matter's beta. Each of us had a unique biggest learnings during our 1yr beta, so I thought it would be fun to also chime in even though the question wasn't directed at me ๐บ
My biggest learning...
Before even starting Matter or raising any venture money, we talked to about 100 people to gauge people's interest around growing their skills and their opinions on the peer feedback apps currently offered at their company.
It was strikingly clear that there was a large group of people with the growth-mindset that were hungry for higher quality, more frequent and actionable feedback than what their company/boss provided.
What was REALLY surprising was people did not know what they should be getting feedback on. We learned people were looking to Matter to get to know them, understand their aspirations and then make ongoing recommendations on what kind of feedback would be most useful to them. That's why our onboarding flow asks a series of hopefully fun questions to get to know the person and then make skill recommendations.
This also resulted in us creating what we call our Smart Survey (@jw's brilliant idea), which dynamically adjusts what feedback Matter asks your peers so that it's most useful and timely.
@matt_edelman While in closed BETA or customer feedback loops and user testing was invaluable for moving us forward. Equally testimonials kept us motivated and focused. Things we learned:
โข optimization on flows can be tough in closed BETA as you inhibit natural user onboarding
โข it takes 3 revisions to get to something really good
โข having the correct tools to measure are instrumental to your success, @mixpanel , @intercom, and @fullstory have been game changers for us
Re 2019
โข Improving on the features our customers love, and adding the additional functionality that enables Matter to be personalized
I've used Matter a few times to provide feedback over the past few months and it was a joy to use. Now we're starting to use it internally and I'm excited to see how it helps us improve!
Pros:Easy to use app that guides you through providing and receiving great, actionable feedback.
Cons:None so far!
Thanks for helping and supporting @zackmeredith as well as the rest of the team at @zerofinancial Big thanks for you and @morganknutson /team whom continue to help us evolve ๐
Matter has helped me grow exponentially as a designer. Being able to gain feedback without waiting for things like performance reviews has been amazing. I can't wait to see what else their team is able to do with this platform.
Pros:Simple, fast, consistent, and actionable feedback.
Cons:None.
Thanks @parkerhendo ๐ Looking forward to your continued feedback. Don't hesitate to ping us. ๐
Simple and beautifully designed tool for actionable feedback ๐. It's the best performance review tool I've ever used. It only takes a handful of clicks to set up and start giving and receiving feedback. Things I like about:
โจ You don't have to wait for a boss or process to get feedback and start improving
โจ You can give and get feedback in minutes (instead of staring at performance evals for hours)
โจ Matter provides suggestions of types of feedback so it's a painless (even delightful!) process
@julia_lipton That's so great to hear! The entire Matter team is thrilled to have you join us during our beta. I'm looking forward to hearing more of your feedback on how the team can continue to make Matter work even better for you! โค๏ธ
@julia_lipton ๐ปWow! Wow! Thank you so much for sharing this with the team!
@julia_lipton thanks so much for your kind words! Definitely looking forward to hearing more from you
Hello everyone,
I am a research scientist at UC Berkeleyโs psychology department and I happen to be in a team with two bosses who dislike one another.
I was at Wharton before Berkeley and something called a โ360 feedbackโ was the tool we used to alleviate tension between team members. In essence, every person grills every other person in the team until everyone is finished.
โจAfter several weeks of asking my superiors to do a โ360โ, I realized that while face-to-face hostility is customary amongst business folk, academics are on the softer end of the spectrum and tend to avoid real life confrontation. I guess this explains why we publish papers as opposed to hosting debates on live TV ๐
Googling for a solution I came across the Matter app and to my astonishment I received written feedback from my superiors the night I submitted mine. This was so unexpected that I decided to look it up and it turns out that while written feedback is as effective as spoken, written is much easier to give (https://doi.org/10.1089/10949310... and https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/m...). We might need many more exchanges on Matter to resolve all our problems but our team dynamics have become much healthier.
This platform is a useful tool and I wish the best of luck to the Matter team!
Cheers,
Kenneth
@kenneth_kel this is amazing! We are so happy you found Matter and are having a great experience using Matter to receive feedback and grow. We're lucky to have you as one of our early users. Thank you!
@kenneth_kel Hi Kenneth! As a fellow psychologist in academia, I applaud (and very much agree with!) this comment. In graduate school, there was no formal mechanism or structure for receiving feedback and I really wish there was. Other academic settings are similarly noncommittal and it does such a disservice to professionals in this field. Giving/receiving regular feedback paves the way for individual and team growth. Would love to see this kind of thing adopted more broadly in our field!
Matter is an incredible product! I've had the pleasure of chatting with @bretthellman about Matter during the closed beta and it has helped me at a pivotal point in my career to get really valuable feedback. Everyone needs ways to be built up and growโas professionals and human beings.
@jdsimcoe love hearing this story! I'm glad you like it. I hope you'll continue to use Matter as your career progresses โค๏ธ
Getting constructive feedback on your work is hard within any team environment. Matter solves that by giving you the right tools to get your team on board and share feedback that will help them further their career. I always encourage my team to focus on their skills and growth, so Matter is a unique and effortless way to provide the necessary guidance to achieve that.
Pros:Actionable feedback, easy-to-use, great for teams
Cons:Mobile app?
@mengto Thank you so much for checking out Matter and supporting constructive feedback! For small teams like ours, I could easily see how giving and receiving feedback could be a challenge. Especially when you work so closely with one another. It's wonderful that your team has someone like you focused on developing their skills as well as growth. You've taught not only your team, but also thousands of designers and creatives how to code, and use new tools which help them develop their skills!
Is there any skill in particular you're focused on this year, or next year?
@mengto thank you again for taking the time to experience Matter and for leaving a review. I hope we'll get to hear more from you!
I wanted to follow-up on your Mobile app question. As you've likely discovered, we do not currently have a native mobile experience. We do have a mobile responsive experience. The reason why is since Matter allows individuals to ask their trusted peers for feedback, we felt that including the requirement to download a native app to provide feedback was too much of a burden.
Now that Matter as a company is at the stage where we have a healthy and growing number of active users, we are starting to explore the idea of providing users with a native mobile experience to make it even easier for active users to give feedback, view their feedback, track their progress and more.
Feedback is rocket fuel for professional growth. Matter is the best tool Iโve found to get that feedback.
@lenny_rachitsky ๐ฑ๐ yea! It's all about having that growth mindset. Your quote is still one of my favorite: "As knowledge workers we are paid to use our brains. We spend too little time improving how our brains work."
Congrats @bretthellman and team for launching Matter. Couple of questions for you:
1) What makes Matter different than some of its competitors?
2) What are some of the features that the team is working on that we can expect in the next few weeks?
@nikunj - let's get into it! ๐ฅ
What makes Matter different than some of its competitors?
* Matter puts you in the driverโs seat of getting quality feedback. With Matter, feedback is no longer a process you passively wait for, but one in which you are actively in control. You select the professional skills you care about and the peers you trust to provide you with feedback. Hence, No Boss Required.โข๏ธ
๐ That's a lot of quality marketing speak... Bluntly, you are Matter's customer, not your boss or VP of HR. Matter gets the feedback you care about, from the people you care about, tracks the goals you care about... Matter is not what your company or boss tell you that you should care about. You can take Matter with you as you change companies, keeping your learnings and tracking your career progress - no different than how you take your LinkedIn profile from company to company. Why lose all those amazing learnings?
* We'd like to think Matter's execution is a major step above our competitors. But let us be honest, everyone ceo says that! But in our case, since we heard it from our users, maybe it's true! Given we're the first and only bottoms up feedback app for professionals who want to grow their skills - we don't have a direct comparison. Our competitor is people deciding to do nothing.
I love to use Matter to collect feedback and grow as a software engineer :)
@emmanuel_genene yea! we love seeing engineers using Matter to grow their skills.
Iโve used this product throughout the beta and I can say itโs amazing. I think it can truly benefit teams across orgs. Could see this changing the game in terms of giving feedback to managers in the enterprise space. Nice job Brett and Marc!
@theodorestrauss amazing! So happy to see you loving Matter. Thanks for helping us spread the word. And another thank you for all your feedback during the beta period. โค๏ธ
It's so nice to finally share Matter with the world ๐ Thanks for all your help making it happen!
@epan Love hearing Matter helped discover potential blind spots. ๐ ๐ช
I started using it today and seems like it's gonna be really fun
Pros:Amazing user interface. Looks really friendly and juicy. Cant wait to start using it!
Cons:I dont really know how i'd react to criticism on this platform. I guess I'll find out
Nice! Today's a great day to get started. Let us know how we can help and please share all your feedback on how we can take Matter to the next level!
Matter