3. Create your own Culture of Experimentation
Our Culture of Experimentation
Context: our roots, structure and values
Agenda
What you can do
How we evolved
Who is Mozilla
3.
2.
1.
4. What is a Mozilla?
Our roots, structure & values
14. Change the entire culture of Mozilla
in a grassroots way.
For this type of reasoning and
decision-making to become the
norm.
Our goal
15. The Culture of Experimentation initiative
is an attempt to bring about an
organization-wide cultural shift towards
empowering brave experimentation in
all things across all functional roles in
the Mozilla organization.
What we
came up
with
20. Understanding where to focus
our Webcompat efforts is
HARD!!! Can we crowdsource
Webcompat feedback to better
understand where we should
invest our time and resources?
21. “We believe that focusing our
product roadmap on priv/sec
features in Firefox can drive
growth and help us reclaim our
positioning in the market.”
23. Change the entire culture of Mozilla
in a grassroots way.
For this type of reasoning and
decision-making to become the
norm.
How’d
we do?
24. Caveat: we work w/ smaller projects
as teaching tool
List of project successes: Monitor,
Containers, Secure Proxy, ETP
….and
CoE Footprint in
released Products
25.
26. Over 4 Million protected
email addresses. Many
of them non-Firefox
30. Enhanced Tracking Protection
Now rolled out to 100% of the Firefox
population. We’re still working on
improvements, but so far we’ve seen
no negative impact to retention or
increased reports of webcompat
issues.
33. ● Make cupcakes - think local first to act global
● Think like an investor - get on the right track
before investing too much
● AVOID Fail Vs. Win: Celebrate Failures as
Learnings [familiar LEAN concept for good
reason]
● If you do #1, #2, failures will be small and returns
still large: HEDGE
Advice
intros and how we got to mozilla and our history here
me - career = startups + employee comms. People are force-multipliers.
Matt_G worked at many tech companies. Never believed in the products or mission. Was a contributor. Stars aligned and now I work for a company where I believe in the products and the mission. Dream come true! Made my career by helping people answer questions faster and cheaper. It’s been a long road.
love how we’re positioned for ENTERPRISE - GVT - NON-PROFIT *and* - STARTUP.
We’re a lot of things. Here’s 3 critical things -
Maker of Firefox (roots)
Open source & mission driven
501(c)(3) (structure)
#1 - Maker of Firefox (roots)
Things were bleak in ‘98. MS had crushed its primary browser competitor, Netscape Navigator, by illegally leveraging its desktop OS monopoly.
So, the Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code. It’s original name was Phoenix (as in, arising from the ashes…).
#2 - ****Open source and mission driven (Manifesto)
Open source: Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004 and became a big success — in less than a year, it was downloaded over 100M times - November 9, 2004
Firefox 1.0 Released - this ad was an early example of “crowdsourcing” :)
Firefox 3.0 set a Guinness World Record in 2008 for most # of downloads in one day
Developers have also contributed then and through today.
Emphasize how because this was and is a community, people to this day still want to be involved.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-places-two-page-advocacy-ad-in-the-new-york-times/
SpreadFirefox
Thousands of people contributed to make this happen.
April 2005 - 50 million downloads
show coin.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2008/07/mozilla-sets-new-guinness-world-record-with-firefox-3-downloads/
Mozilla today announced it set a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. The record-setting 8,002,530 downloads coincided with the launch of Firefox® 3, Mozilla’s major update to its popular and acclaimed free, open source Web browser.
...and….just a reminder…..
****#3: Corporate Structure
1 -- CORPORATE STRUCTURE
Foundation is our sole shareholder.
2 -- 501(c)(3) + Mission (foreshadow…):
Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.
An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
So this thing of people just downloading us was a great ride…..
But then came mobile (which is local). And social.
And indeed, this brought us data. LOTS of data. BIG data.
But we’d had a product that didn’t depend on data. A wildly successful product. We built it and people downloaded it, loved us, and downloaded a newer version later. We didn’t speak directly with them, but we had their love. And we respected their privacy. See Manifesto Principle #4. We lived this stuff (spoiler: we still do).
But we also knew that mobile was an increasingly important part of people’s lives, and we needed to play there as well as on the desktop. But it was hard in the mobile stack world. Our first Android release was March 29 2011 - but it’s tough to compete with a browser that’s integrated into the stack. Even now we still struggle to gain market share on mobile because the world is still run by two mobile OSs.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2011/03/29/mozilla-launches-firefox-4-for-android-allowing-users-to-take-the-power-and-customization-of-firefox-everywhere-2/
So we rolled our own. OS, that is. In 2011, our R&D group at the time, Mozilla Labs, started to build a mobile operating system and nicknamed it “Boot-to-Gecko” (in honor of our browser engine), which we then productized as Firefox OS, and commercialized through distribution partnerships with mobile carriers such as Telefonica and handset makers like LG Electronics, ZTE, Huawei and TCL Corporation]. (4 handset makers, 5 wireless carrriers to provide five Firefox-powered smartphones in Europe and Latin America)
By 2013 we had a number of devices in the market, with a goal to disrupt the mobile app ecosystem, giving users choice and opportunities beyond the gated operating system duopoly.
But there were a few issues…..
At the time, the mobile web wasn’t so great. Performance for apps far exceeded mobile web performance.
We gave up the roadmap and priorities to our partners.
The effort was a classic example of combining engineering excellence with a strong commitment to a mission, but neglecting user perspectives and needs. Ultimately, the work was driven by a perceived need to get to market quickly, and the carrier partners who provided us with distribution but not the specific needs of end-users. One of our staff members posted: “‘open’ on its own doesn’t sell.”
Launched in ‘12…. and shuttered in ‘15…..
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-the-Firefox-OS-and-why-did-it-fail
How FxOS happened (aversion to data, commitment to mission, little-to-no MVP or user research owing to our download legacy) - DT
Cue CoE: why it was set up, how and what goals - DT-to-the-MG
Being the grassroots… challenger type org we are…. an internal Core Influencer Group tasked with how can we adapt….OVER TO MATT:
Importantly, as an open source project, we put it all out in writing. Not just our mission, but how we want to achieve it.
These operating principles, all to help us respect the sovereignty and agency of our users, are what we call our “Manifesto.”
And, as you can imagine these days, this fourth one’s pretty important. But it’s actually always been important to us. Even before the current era of “Big Data.”
MATT: Core Influencer….
Evidence based decision-making can improve your work no matter what your role is in the organization
Identifying sources of data already available to you. You might already have your answer!
The difference between beliefs vs. evidence
How to talk about and reason about the different types of evidence
Tools and resources available for knowledge gathering within Mozilla
Creating a shared vocabulary
WE DO DRY MARKET TESTS DIFFERENTLY
DESCOPING. NO MO WATERFALLS.
Agile and iteration to reduce risk => LEAN-like.SMALL PROJECTS = list some examples
not just engineering stuff e.g. ->
webcompat work
tl;dr newsletter https://mailchi.mp/d94bf8770928/v2n18?e=%5BUNIQID%5D May 2, 2019
Spotter deck -> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qpl35fvyPvCzpyMAQMwdjK49rSh7YToUxoGZUcyG5yA/edit#slide=id.g4974be31b9_0_71
Importantly, as an open source project, we put it all out in writing. Not just our mission, but how we want to achieve it.
These operating principles, all to help us respect the sovereignty and agency of our users, are what we call our “Manifesto.”
And, as you can imagine these days, this fourth one’s pretty important. But it’s actually always been important to us. Even before the current era of “Big Data.”
PRODUCT DATA + VISUALS
PRODUCT DATA + VISUALS
PRODUCT DATA + VISUALS
PRODUCT DATA + VISUALS
PRODUCT DATA + VISUALS
PRODUCT DATA + VISUALS
PRODUCT DATA + VISUALS
Mozilla has won two awards for innovation in the last year. All the projects mentioned have roots in CoE