I’m going to share a bit about selecting a community communications platform, our updated company core values, and how goals have evolved over the years at LINBIT.
Freenode → Slack → Discourse Forum
It was mid May 2021 and the news that Freenode was being taken over was popping up on all of the news feeds. I remember it like it was yesterday… not really I’m three kids deep and can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve slept through the night in the past 12 years. Anyway, with Andrew Lee claiming stake over the Freenode infrastructure and several of the senior members resigning, and the fate of Freenode not looking so hot, LINBIT was left with a decision: What do we do with our #drbd channel and how do we interact with our community?
At this point in time we had been working fully remote for just over a year, 14 months to be exact. We “temporarily” closed the office on March 12th 2020. We had been using Slack as our internal communication tool for some time and it seemed to be working out well. I had seen several other companies using Slack to interact with their communities, so I made the push for Slack instead of going toward another platform, Libera Chat. I was able to convince the powers that be and we started our linbit-community Slack space.
We had gotten most of our Freenode users to migrate with us and it seemed like this might just work. There was some activity here and there, but nothing like the Freenode days. Eventually, we hit the free tier 10,000 message history limit, making the search history feature within Slack worthless. After a few years of trying to push that rope up the hill, I called it quits and we announced the closure of the linbit-community Slack. My Slack project was a failed experiment.
Queue the opening of forums.linbit.com. During the first couple of years post 2020, I, like many others, had been watching a lot of YouTube videos. I had come across Tom Lawrence. He does some exceptional tech videos. At the end of his videos he would always mention his forums. It got me thinking about the benefits of forums vs Slack – the biggest one being that a forum is indexed by Google, which would make it easier for people to find answers about using LINBIT software, even without knowing the forums existed beforehand. Additionally, by using a forum space, we wouldn’t have any historical limits like Slack. So in March of 2024 we made the jump to Discourse. I’m happy to say that already the forums seem to be a better place for discussion.
Core values
Me being transparent about how our community interactions have evolved since the IRC days is a great segue into our core values. Which just so happens to include transparency as the first value. Here at LINBIT we remember them by the acronym TRC. I’ll summarize them as follows:
Transparency: We value trust, honesty, and integrity. We give people all the necessary data to make the right decisions and believe that doing this will ensure successful outcomes.
Reliability: We expect our team members to take accountability and ownership of their responsibilities and to strive for timely, useful responses. This will promote a culture of trust and meaningful collaboration.
Community: We will provide a collaborative ecosystem and combine our efforts to ensure success, becoming stronger together as a team and with our users. We will respect new perspectives because everyone has something to offer. We will listen and learn. The continuous improvement of our software is based on engagements with our users.
The idea to redefine these values came from Kelsey, our US Sales team manager. She attended a leadership workshop and quickly realized that our previously defined values did not convey our values in a way that was easy to remember or understand. Upon hearing Kelsey’s feedback, Kelsey and I got to work on redefining the values so that we could present our proposal to the team, then to Phil (our CEO) for acceptance. I’m happy to say that Phil accepted our changes and what was once a set of six values is now three and is much easier for us to remember. We strive to apply these values to all interactions both internally and externally.
Goal setting
As we wrap up the year, and I wrap up this newsletter, the final topic on the docket is goal setting. We do goal setting at the beginning of every year, right after the New Year’s break. For the US team this means, Kelsey (Sales Manager), Devin (Engineering/Support Manager), Sarah (Director of Administration), and myself all get together and review last year’s data and establish goals for the upcoming year.
When we first started the LINBIT US office, our goal was simple; “Make enough to pay the bills.” Easy to say. Harder to execute on. Over the past 16+ years, this goal has evolved from simply setting a yearly revenue goal to outlining multiple goals for each individual team. We’ve gathered enough data points that we feel confident in setting meaningful goals.
Goal setting for personal life and for business are different beasts. Personal goals can be challenging, as you have to know your own limits and where you can and can’t push yourself, but at the end of the day the onus lays on you. My tactic for dealing with the internal struggle is asking myself, “How badly do you want it?” That question will give you the answer to whether you push yourself or give up. Inevitably, I always answer that question and push through the blocks I have. That scenario works on a personal level, however that mentality is not for everyone.
Goal setting for the business is a little more tricky as you’re balancing your limits, plus having to understand the limits of those on the teams, and knowing when to push or when to pull back, all while moving the business in the right direction. Throw into the mix that every individual is motivated by different factors, and that people want to like their jobs, so we need to consider these things.
Normally, when setting team goals we look at the previous year’s data and set a goal to increase what was done by some percentage. For example, for 2024 we set an evaluation customer closed-won conversion rate of 45%. This example also gives us an opportunity to learn something. About three months into 2024, a team member, Matt, brought up a valid point, a percentage is going to be extremely hard to recover from if it’s not met and maintained. A better solution would be to set a number of closed-won evaluations. The lesson here is that your goals need to be adaptable. Sometimes our intention when setting the goal, although in the right direction, might need to be adapted for new information.
This ties into our last value of “Community”. In this case, the community was a LINBIT team member. He brought to our attention that we needed to modify our goal and after listening to his points, I realized he was right. The point behind goals is to set a milestone for achievement. Set goals too high and you’ll be met with failure and demoralization. Set goals too low and while you might feel good for achieving them, the business will not succeed because there is no advancement.
