fleet/handbook/company.md

Company

About Fleet

Fleet Device Management Inc is an open core company that sells subscriptions that offer more features and support for Fleet and osquery, the leading open source endpoint agent.

We are dedicated to:

• 🧑‍🚀 automating IT and security
• 💍 reducing the proliferation of agents and growing the adoption of osquery (one agent to rule them all)
• 🪟 privacy, transparency, and trust through open source software
• 👁️ remaining the freshest, simplest source of truth for every kind of computing device and OS
• 💻 building a better way to manage computers

Culture

All remote

Fleet Device Management Inc. is an all-remote company, with team members spread across 4 continents and 8 time zones. The wider team of contributors from all over the world submit patches, bug reports, troubleshooting tips, improvements, and real-world insights to Fleet's open source code base, documentation, website, and company handbook.

Open source

The majority of the code, documentation, and content we create at Fleet is public and source-available, and we strive to be broadly open and transparent in the way we run the business; as much as confidentiality agreements (and time) allow. We perform better with an audience, and our audience performs better with us.

🌈 Values

Fleet's values are a set of five ideals adopted by everyone on the team. They describe the culture we are working together to deliver, inside and outside the company:

1. 🔴 Empathy
2. 🟠 Ownership
3. 🟢 Balance
4. 🔵 Objectivity
5. 🟣 Openness

When a new team member joins Fleet, they adopt the values, from day 1. This way, even as the company grows, everybody knows what to expect from the people they work with. Having a shared mindset keeps us quick and determined.

🔴 Empathy

Empathy leads to better understanding, better communication, and better decisions. Try to understand what people may be going through, so you can help make it better.

• be customer first
  • consider your counterpart
  • for example: customers, contributors, colleagues, the other person in your Zoom meeting, the other folks in a Slack channel, the people who use software and APIs you build, the people following the processes you design.
  • ask questions like you would want to be asked
  • assume positive intent
  • be kind
  • quickly review pending changes where your review was requested
  • be punctual
  • end meetings on time
• role play as a user
  • don't be afraid to rely on your imagination to understand
  • developers are users too (REST API, fleetctl, docs)
  • contributor experience matters (but product quality and commitments come first)
  • bugs cause frustrating experiences and alienate users
  • patch with care (upgrading to new releases of Fleet can be time-consuming for users running self-managed deployments)
  • confusing error messages make people feel helpless, and can fill them with despair
  • error messages deserve to be good (it's worth it to spend time on them)
  • UI help text and labels deserve to be good (it's worth it to spend time on them)
• hospitality
  • "be a helper" -mr rogers
  • think and say positive things
  • use the #thanks channel to show genuine gratitude for other team member's actions
  • talking with users and contributors is time well spent
  • embrace the excitement of others (it's contagious)
  • make small talk at the beginning of meetings
  • be generous (go above and beyond; for example, the majority of the features Fleet releases will always be free)
  • apply customer service principles to all users, even if they never buy Fleet
  • be our guest
• better humanity

🟠 Ownership

• take responsibility
  • think like an owner
  • follow through on commitments (actions match your words)
  • own up to mistakes
  • understand why it matters (the goals of the work you are doing)
  • consider business impact (fast forward 12 months, consider total cost of ownership over the eternity of maintenance)
  • do things that don't scale, sometimes
• be responsive
  • respond quickly, even if you can't take further action at that exact moment
  • when you disagree, give your feedback; then agree and commit, or disagree and commit anyway
  • prefer short calls to long, asynchronous back and forth discussions in Slack
  • procrastination is a symptom of not knowing what to do next (if you find yourself avoiding reading or responding to a message, schedule a Zoom call with the people you need to figure it out)
• we win or lose together
  • think about the big picture, beyond your individual team's goals
  • success == creating value for customers
  • you're not alone in this - there's a great community of people able and happy to help
  • don't be afraid to spend time helping users, customers, and contributors (including colleagues on other teams)
  • be proactive: ask other contributors how you can help, regardless who is assigned to what
  • get all the way done; help unblock team members and other contributors to deliver value
• take pride in your work
  • be efficient (your time is valuable, your work matters, and your focus is a finite resource; it matters how you spend it)
  • you don't need permission to be thoughtful
  • reread anything you write for users
  • take your ideas seriously (great ideas come from everyone; write them out and see if they have merit)
  • think for yourself, from first principles
  • use reason (believe in your brain's capacity to evaluate a solution or idea, regardless of how popular it is)
  • you are on a hero's journey (motivate yourself intrinsically with self-talk; even boring tasks are more motivating, fun, and effective when you care)
• better results

🟢 Balance

Between overthinking and rushing, there is a golden mean.

• iterate
  • baby steps
  • pick low-hanging fruit (deliver value quickly where you can)
  • think ahead, then make the right decision for now
  • look before you leap (when facing a non-trivial problem, get perspective before you dive in; what if there is a simpler solution?)
• move quickly
  • "everything is in draft"
  • think, fast (balance thoughtfulness and planning with moving quickly)
  • aim to deliver daily
  • move quicker than 90% of the humans you know
  • resist gold-plating; avoid bike-shedding
• less is more
  • focus on fewer tasks at one time
  • "boring solutions"
  • finish what you start, or at least throw it away loudly in case someone wants it
  • keep it simple (prioritize simplicity; people crave mental space in design, collaboration, and most areas of life)
  • use fewer words (lots of text == lots of work)
  • as time allows ("I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." -Blaise Pascal)
• make time for self-care
  • to help you bring your best self when communicating with others, making decisions, etc
  • consider taking a break or going for a walk
  • take time off; it is better to have 100% focus for 80% of the time than it is to have 80% focus for 100% of the time
  • think about how to best organize your day/work hours to fit your life and maximize your focus
• better focus

🔵 Objectivity

• be curious
  • ask great questions & take the time to truly listen
  • listen intently to feedback, and genuinely try to understand (especially constructive criticism)
  • see failure as a beginning (it is rare to get things right the first time)
  • question yourself ("why do I think this?")
• underpromise, overdeliver
  • quality results often take longer than we anticipate
  • be practical about your limits, and about what's possible with the time and resources we have
  • be thorough (don't settle for "the happy path"; every real-world edge case deserves handling)
• prioritize truth (reality)
  • be wrong, show your work (it's better to make the right decision than it is to be right)
  • "strong opinions, loosely held" (proceed boldly, but change your mind in the face of new evidence)
  • avoid sunk cost fallacy (getting attached to something just because you invested time working on it, or came up with it)
  • be fair to competitors ("may the best product win.")
  • give credit where credit is due; don't show favoritism
  • facts, over commentary
• speak computer to computers
  • a lucky fix without understanding does more harm than good
  • when something isn't working, use the scientific method
  • especially when there is a bug, or when something is slow, or when a customer is having a problem
  • assume it's your fault
  • assume nothing else
• better rigour

🟣 Openness

• anyone can contribute
  • be outsider-friendly, inclusive, and approachable
  • use small words so readers understand more easily
  • prioritize accessible terminology and simple explanations to provide value to the largest possible audience of users
  • avoid acronyms and idioms which might not translate
  • welcome contributions to your team's work, from people inside or outside the company
  • get comfortable letting others contribute to your domain
  • believe in everyone
• write things down
  • "handbook first"
  • writing it down makes it real and allows others to read on their own time (and in their own timezone)
  • never stop consolidating and deduplicating content (gradually, consistently, bit by bit)
• embrace candor
  • "short toes" (don't be afraid of stepping on toes)
  • don't be afraid to speak up (ask questions, be direct, and interrupt)
  • give pointed, respectful feedback
  • take initiative in trying to improve things (no need to wait for consensus)
  • communicate openly (if you think you should send a message to communicate something, send it; but keep comments brief and relevant)
• be transparent
  • "public by default"
  • build in the open
  • declassify with care (easier to overlook confidential info when declassifying vs. when changing something that is already public from the get-go)
  • open source is forever
• better collaboration

History

2014: Origins of osquery

In 2014, our CTO Zach Wasserman, together with Mike Arpaia and the rest of their team at Facebook, created an open source project called osquery.

2016: Origins of Fleet v1.0

A few years later, Zach, Mike Arpaia, and Jason Meller founded Kolide and created Fleet: an open source platform that made it easier and more productive to use osquery in an enterprise setting.

2019: The growing community

When Kolide's attention shifted away from Fleet and towards their separate, user-focused SaaS offering, the Fleet community took over maintenance of the open source project. After his time at Kolide, Zach continued as lead maintainer of Fleet. He spent 2019 consulting and working with the growing open source community to support and extend the capabilities of the Fleet platform.

2020: Fleet was incorporated

Zach partnered with our CEO, Mike McNeil, to found a new, independent company: Fleet Device Management Inc. In November 2020, we announced the transition and kicked off the logistics of moving the GitHub repository.