In Matter Labs, we want to build a great product, by writing good code. This handbook describes our vision of how we achieve that.

For external readers, it aims to provide a glimpse of what working at Matter Labs looks like.

For internal readers, it aims to define expectations for both themselves and their colleagues.

At the same time, Matter Labs is a rapidly growing start-up in a very competitive industry. And the ability to compete often comes with tradeoffs and priority changes (even though some teams, depending on the scope of their work, are much less affected by this). This fact makes it very hard to even define company-wide processes that are followed 100% of the time, let alone fully commit to only following best practices.

Yet, it is our priority to do well. Thus, the main prerequisite that makes the rest of this handbook possible is

$$ \LARGE {Ownership} $$

Everyone in the company is expected to own the things they are directly responsible for or find important. If you own the project, you keep looking for it until the project is complete. If you are working on a task, you own it until it successfully lands in production. If you see a problem, be it a pull request needing a review, low test coverage, annoying internal tooling, or getting off the critical path, we expect you to speak up.

What differentiates ownership from responsibility is that you care. You are responsible if you do the tickets that are assigned to you on time and your PRs pass peer review. You own something when you start to think critically about your own job and its relation with the business. When you start thinking if you really spend your time optimally, if a particular job is properly prioritized, if the design is right, if our approach to testing is sufficient, etc.

We value independent thinking (it’s an aspect of freedom, isn’t it?), we value expertise, we value learning. We believe it’s much more productive for the company and much more fun for people to go beyond just doing what somebody else asked them to do.

Finally, another important aspect of ownership is that you accept external factors as your problem. Although sometimes they indeed can ruin an enterprise and it’s clear that a person really can’t do anything, it’s much more often in a grey zone, so we do our best to complete the job instead of looking for an excuse.

Others do it, and that’s how we make things work.