Finding focus & data sovereignty: A leading data science hub moves from Slack to Mattermost

This organization generates over $10 million in revenue each year running a robust online community that boasts more than 20 million members. In addition to offering products, the company also hosts several competitions throughout the year. Founded more than a decade ago, the company was acquired by a parent organization and is currently powered by a team of 70 employees.

Replacing Slack: Seeking a messaging solution that complied with internal policies

Prior to being acquired, the community had been using Slack for collaboration. Over the years, the team had grown quite accustomed to the SaaS platform’s functionality, which was particularly popular among developers.

“One of the biggest pain points for us is context switching, and by dividing conversations into specific channels, it allows you to refocus what you’re looking at in terms of the theme or the context as opposed to having to dig through emails and try to figure out, ‘Does this apply to me?’” says the organization’s program manager.

After the acquisition was complete, the organization needed to comply with its parent company’s internal policies, which require teams to use tools that enable them to host sensitive data on infrastructure they control.

“If we were having any sort of internal conversations that would be meaningful, they had to be held on our hardware, and they couldn’t be held on software owned by a third party or on a data storage owned by a third party,” the program manager continues. “If you want to have conversations within your own team that are proprietary or are about products that are yet to be released or may be sensitive in nature, you prefer to keep that within your own existing infrastructure. Hosting software on our own servers is the better strategic move for our company.” 

Achieving data sovereignty: Self-hosting Mattermost on their own infrastructure

As the team began looking for a Slack alternative, they zeroed in on their two chief requirements: In addition to being able to host the platform on their own servers, they wanted a tool that allowed them to organize conversations by topics. 

While researching potential solutions, a member of the team came across Mattermost and recommended they further explore it. After doing their due diligence, they determined that Mattermost was the ideal Slack replacement and migrated to the platform in 2021.

“Mattermost was able to solve a majority of our needs and allow us to continue to have that collaborative environment of messaging while being able to keep our service on our own servers and not actually hosted by a third party,” the program manager says. “It lets us continue to have conversations in a very agile and flexible way so we can move quickly and effectively while also having fun at the same time.” 

Sharpening focus: Maintaining history, reducing reliance on email & automating alerts 

Thanks to Mattermost’s Slack migration tool, the organization was able to easily export more than a decade’s worth of messaging data to Mattermost — preserving its historical knowledge base along the way.

“We were able to port all of our existing history from Slack to Mattermost fairly seamlessly,” the program manager says. “We didn’t want to lose that when we were coming over to Mattermost. There are still times where I’ll be searching for messages written before I even joined the team, and I can search for them in Mattermost, and those will pop up. I don’t know if we would have been able to complete the full migration without that data.” 

From strategy to triage: Mattermost as the front line of defense 

The way the program manager sees it, Mattermost is the place where work gets done and where mission-critical data lives; today, email is almost exclusively used to communicate with external parties — that’s it.

“Our day-to-day work starts and ends with Mattermost — whether it’s talking about a high-level strategic thing, going with the nitty-gritty details of a project launch, or recapping a meeting we had with somebody else so the rest of the team knows about it,” the program manager explains. “In the morning, usually before I even check my email, I check Mattermost and see where I have unread messages and I can kind of parse my day through. Here are some channels I subscribe to that are more just an FYI. Here’s some channels where I’m on the team and can figure out which conversations I need to pay attention to. Here’s a channel where I’ve been tagged into something so I know I need to respond to it specifically. Here’s a thread of something that’s being brought up from a couple weeks ago and finally being checked in on. And so it just really streamlines conversations and lets you mentally context switch, and in healthy ways, compartmentalize the types of conversations and projects you’re working on.” 

The organization has created a culture that understands that “work happens in Mattermost.”

“There are so many examples in which Mattermost is not just the front line of defense but it is where all the action is happening — whether we launch a project or there’s some immediate triage needed,” the program manager says. “It creates a certain agility that you don’t necessarily get with email.”

Streamlining cross-team collaboration: Creating dedicated channels for critical projects

Everyone at the organization uses Mattermost to collaborate, and the team also uses Mattermost to collaborate with colleagues from the parent organization. “It makes it a lot easier than trying to maintain a bunch of large group chats,” the program manager says. 

To illustrate, someone on a different team might help the organization launch a competition, and they’ll be invited into a Mattermost channel dedicated to that project. 

“We say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come join this Mattermost channel and we can tag you in it because this is where the collaboration for this project happens,” he continues. “That way, we don’t need to have a series of emails back and forth with you. We invite them into those specific channels on a one-off basis.”

Each year, the organization launches 500 competitions, 50 of which are prominently featured on the company’s website. When those bigger competitions are launched, an announcement is automatically posted on the company’s main Mattermost channels so everyone can see it. This level of visibility helps the team be more responsive, giving them a critical competitive advantage and enabling them to strike while the iron is hot, capitalizing on opportunities to shape public perception and awareness of each project.  

From alert to action: Mattermost kicks off critical processes with automated incident notification

Taking advantage of Mattermost’s open source nature, the organization has added a number of integrations with automated tooling to their instance, enabling them to learn about issues immediately and accelerate the response process. For example, if there are error messages on the company’s website, that information is automatically piped over to a Mattermost channel, and the team can quickly start on a fix.

“We can basically work in Mattermost and not rely on emails that get buried to tell us when something is going wrong,” he says. “We can then click into the issue through the Mattermost channel as opposed to having to go to a different dashboard.” 

Using Mattermost, the team has accelerated incident notifications, enabling them to rapidly kick off critical processes when every second matters. As an example, the organization sets certain expectations for each project, and when thresholds aren’t met — maybe a notebook runs too long and times out unexpectedly — they’ll receive automatic alerts.

“When those thresholds or expectations fail, that will push notifications to Mattermost to bring it to our attention in a more of an urgent fashion,” the program manager explains. “And then that notification includes links that we can double-click into to better understand what the actual error message is and begin working on a fix.”

Building a tight-knit, productivity-driven team that has fun at work

In addition to helping them get more done every day while completely controlling their sensitive messaging data, Mattermost also makes work more enjoyable for the team; they maintain several channels “that are more fun or just goofy,” the program manager says.

“We create custom emojis based off of team members, and we use them all the time,” he explains, adding that the organization was able to port its custom emojis from Slack to Mattermost during the migration. “As a cultural element, it’s really important, and the integration was pretty seamless to let us pick up where we left off pretty quickly.”

The program manager is quick to recommend Mattermost to any organization looking to reduce context switching, increase agility, or eliminate emails — and particularly those that need an on-premises solution.

“Mattermost is a great tool,” he concludes. “It’s very much served our purposes as a collaborative messaging solution. By effectively replacing the majority of our need for emails, it not just saves time, but it increases our productivity exponentially. In a communication-heavy environment or industry, Mattermost is imperative.”