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Brett Hellman

Matter - Take control of your career. Peer feedback for professionals

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Matter
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Matter is for professionals who want to become the best version of themselves. Discover your strengths and reach your aspirations.

🙌 Thanks for taking the time to learn about Matter.

📣We'd love to hear from you below.

Get started 👉 Visit Matter

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Marc Reisen
Maker
👋Product Hunt 😻 As @bretthellman mentioned this is our second go at doing a StartUp together. When Brett shared the idea around Matter with me well over a year ago, and here we are! One of the reasons I left my role at Atlassian as the Design Manager of Bitbucket, and joined Matter is that I am passionate about personal betterment, growth and improvement. The truth is our current state, is not always the best version of ourselves that we can be. It takes change, new challenges, experiences and even failure. This helps us recognize the things we need to improve, foster and in some cases even forget. As a manager, there are several opportunities for us to learn and discover our blindspots. From our peers, team members and our managers/manager. I've spent my time working and focusing on Product and Design. Creating, iterating, crafting. We've managed to balance fun and engaging experiences on Matter that help our users feel empowered and enabled to go out and receive amazing feedback from the people we work with. We've got a lot of exciting ideas and an incredible 🔮vision for Matter and it's future. Please feel free to reach out and ask and Product or Design related questions. Our Toolset 🛠🎨 • Figma • Adobe XD and Creative Cloud Matter is on a mission to improve not only how we engage with feedback, but equally how we learn to give and receive it. We believe: Everyone is deserving of Respect and feeling Accepted ✌️ We all have a desire to learn and grow 🌱 Feedback is a fundamental component to personal growth and betterment 🎯 Why? Because who you are right now, is not the best version you, YOU can be. 💜
Brett Hellman
Maker
@marcreisen yea! we're live 💡 nothing like a little public team PDA. And a special thanks to @jw for introducing us to @Figma ... @zoink
Parker Henderson
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.
Kerem Kazan
Maker
@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.
Brett Hellman
Maker
@marcreisen @mechanical_turk @parkerhendo I feel like FIGMA should be paying me at this point 😜 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.
Parker Henderson
@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!
Brett Hellman
Maker
Hey PH 👋🎉 After a year in closed beta, we’re excited to open up Matter to everyone. We believe: 🏆 Peer feedback is the silver bullet to reaching your aspirations. 👩‍🔬 People perform better when they hear monthly peer feedback (proven by science too!). 🧙‍♂️ Everyone deserves the opportunity to achieve mastery, learn, grow, and be respected by their peers. ✨ Matter makes feedback easier, pleasant, and more productive. ✨ 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 💬 If you have any questions, just reply — the team is around all day! Thank you for joining us! 👩🏻‍🎨👨🏾‍🔧​​👩‍🎤​​👨🏼‍🔬​​🧕🏽​​🐼 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 couldn’t have done anything w/o her.
Kerem Kazan
Maker
Hi everyone! This is Kerem Kazan ( @MechanicalKazan), founding engineer @Matter_HQ. I’m 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, we’d 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 app’s frontend code. At its core, it’s 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, it’s been amazing). We use CypressJS for automated end-to-end testing of our entire app. c) @matterapp/graphql-server: Our web app’s 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. We’re in the process of picking another ORM, (something more typescript friendly). We’ll either go with TypeORM or Sequelize-Typescript. Our server has one endpoint for user-facing api calls, and that’s 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 Matter’s 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!
Phil Miller
Brett Hellman
Maker
@philmil22637493 🤔 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 😜
Kerem Kazan
Maker
@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.
Parker Henderson
@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.
Kerem Kazan
Maker
@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
Danielle Roubinov

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

Marc Reisen
Maker
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! 💜

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.

Marc Reisen
Maker
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. 💜
Ben Koehler

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!

Marc Reisen
Maker
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! 💜
Brett Hellman
Maker
🥂 here's to another 6 months of sharing feedback 😄
Marc Reisen
Maker
@parkerhendo Really good question re: Figma. I'm moving it out here to the main thread for all 👀to 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.
Parker Henderson
@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?
Marc Reisen
Maker
@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!
Parker Henderson
@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.
Marc Reisen
Maker
@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.
Matt Edelman
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?
Brett Hellman
Maker
@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 😺 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.
Marc Reisen
Maker
@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: • optimization on flows can be tough in closed BETA as you inhibit natural user onboarding • it takes 3 revisions to get to something really good • having the correct tools to measure are instrumental to your success, @mixpanel , @intercom, and @fullstory have been game changers for us Re 2019 • Improving on the features our customers love, and adding the additional functionality that enables Matter to be personalized
Zachary Meredith

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!

Marc Reisen
Maker
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 💜
Parker Henderson

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.

Brett Hellman
Maker
Thanks @parkerhendo 🎉 Looking forward to your continued feedback. Don't hesitate to ping us. 🏓
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