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

👋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. 💜

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

@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.

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?

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!

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.