Let’s jump back to October of 2019. We opened a beautiful new office in Belfast, Northern Ireland, overlooking the iconic Harland and Wolff shipyard. The office was a huge investment for Teamwork, $1.2 million in renovation and outfitting, only to find it empty in March of this year due to COVID-19. We now find ourselves re-evaluating our office spaces and people policies heading into 2021.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” So begins the classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. It refers to the premise of the story: A time of despair and suffering on one hand, and joy and hope on the other.

When Mattermost first started, it didn’t make sense for us to have an office; it was just myself and one other person. They were writing code the whole time, and I was on the phone the whole time, and being in the office we ended up interrupting each other. So eventually we started working from our homes and only got together when we needed to catch up.

I’m very excited to announce the general availability of Mattermost Cloud starting today. The new offering brings Mattermost’s industry-leading open-source, self-managed collaboration platform to the cloud as a SaaS platform.

Let’s track the timeline of responses over the last twenty years… IDC reports that workers who manage, create, or edit documents for a company were spending up to 2.5 hours per day searching for what they needed.

I never thought I’d be such a huge fan of team retrospectives. I used to dismiss them as irrelevant for non-engineering teams, or as a twin of the post-mortem (which typically only takes place when something goes wrong, and too often involves feelings of regret and blame). But my attitude changed immediately when I started taking part in retros at Miro.