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Product Manual

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Manifesto

Mission

Our mission is to build the most developer-friendly and customizable CMS on the market while offering an unforgettable content editing experience. Alone? No, thanks to an amazing community of Strapi enthusiasts. We also plan to build the biggest ecosystem of plugins to fit any use case.

Guiding principles

We define ourselves as an open-source product rather than a project. We follow product principles by iterating rapidly in order to deliver value as soon as possible to the maximum number of users. We don't build for specific problems or users. We are looking for impactful actions to reach and help millions of people who want to create, manage and share content. We talk and listen to a lot of community members, customers and partners in order to bring the right solutions to their problems.

Values

How the Product team embodies the Strapi values?

  • Measured ambition: We like to build solid foundations before scaling. Building an ecosystem with the community is a long journey, we know it and we are ready for it.
  • Genuine humility: We avoid the ego. We admit we don't have all the answers, we prefer open discussions, healthy debates to strong certitudes. We do like people with opinions and convictions though. Moreover, we are not the users, we want to understand them by having and showing empathy to their issues.
  • Proactive Responsibility: We are responsible for the users who put their trust in the software. We have to give it back by providing solutions to ensure they are never stuck. Data privacy and anonymity are also at the heart of how we design our system workflows.
  • Rational transparency: We develop most of our work in the open. Everything should be accessible except for security or legal reasons.
  • Active care: Everyone deserves help or at least an answer. It could be internally or externally, we engage ourselves to always care about each other by providing solutions, resources, or being supportive. We are all in the same boat, and we row in the same direction.

How The Team Works

Team structure

Currently, the Product team is split into five different squads based on our user personas. Each squad focuses on a unique and ambitious mission.

  • Developer Experience
    • Persona: Developer
    • Mission: Be the most developer-friendly Headless CMS on the market
  • Content Editing Experience
    • Persona: Content editor
    • Mission: Create the best content editing experience on the market
  • Expansion
    • Persona: Contributor
    • Mission: Build the most active & qualitative open-source ecosystem
  • Growth
    • Persona: New User
    • Mission: Create a frictionless and seamless user experience.
  • Tooling
    • Persona: Strapier
    • Mission: Create and maintain best-in-class (in house) critical tools

Team cadence

Here is the list of team meetings, events, and rituals we have in the Product team:

Management:

  • Weekly 1-1: Every member of the team has a weekly 1-1 with their manager.
  • Quarterly meeting: Every member of the team has a quarterly 1-1 focused on performance.

Operations:

  • Daily Meeting: We have a daily meeting to share our progress and sync on topics we are currently working on.
  • Weekly Team Meeting: We host a team-wide meeting every Tuesday to celebrate achievements, share our learnings, initiatives in progress and roadblocks.
  • Bi-Weekly Vision Meeting: Twice a month, on Thursday, we take 30 minutes to talk about the biggest news in the ecosystem, the mid & long-term strategy to anticipate what's coming and have as much context as possible to empower the team while being fully aligned on our vision and strategy.
  • Bi-Montly Retrospective: Nothing is perfect, we all feel the work differently, it's important to have a safe space to share frustrations, show gratitudes to other teammates and define a set of action items to continuously try to be a better version of ourselves as a team. Thus, we do retrospectives twice a month (note: the frequency can vary from a squad to another).
  • Bi-Annual cool down week: In early April and October, we have a cool-down period that lasts one or two weeks. We stop our daily tasks, instead, we rest, we do workshops, team building events or we do tasks that weren't defined as priority based on the company goals but they matter to us.

More ceremonies are coming to have better synchronization with the other departments such as the Support, Marketing and Documentation teams.

KPIs

  • Installation time
  • Activation rate
  • Retention rate
  • Time to interact (with the UI)
  • Total number of entries created
  • Monthly Active Projects