Now more than ever businesses run on software. That means that your team — whether you’re a “software company” or not — likely includes software developers. Brand and product experiences are increasingly dependent on software, and delivering delightful, compelling experiences depends on having a talented, engaged technical team.

Fostering a developer team that is empowered to consistently and quickly produce their best work is a necessary goal for every software team. But the demands on developer teams to produce more code faster than ever — combined with the challenges of remote work — can create an environment that isn’t conducive to developer productivity. Want to improve developer productivity at your organization?

While many companies focus on building a better product or application, not enough thought goes into the teams that need to build those products. The frontline developers, designers, coders, and contributors that go into building something innovative and amazing often have needs when it comes to creating an environment where they feel valued. Coordinating a cohesive environment where your team feels valued, heard, and able to collaborate can be difficult, especially in the modern world of remote work.

There’s never been quite so many helpful platforms and tools available to help developers ship code faster. But while an army of best-of-breed tools can help solve many of the problems your team faces, they introduce new challenges and complexities of their own. Contending with fragmented tools was the most common challenge cited in our recent survey of developer teams, with 39% of respondents calling it a major productivity challenge.

When we ask our customers what IT teams appreciate most about Mattermost, security is often at the top of the list. The fine-grained control of Mattermost capabilities and the ownership of their critical data within Mattermost are the two most cited benefits. But ownership of data also implies responsibility, and much of the burden of this responsibility is placed on IT to manually execute.

As we head into a new year, technical organizations are more likely than ever to have distributed workforces. While over half of the developers we surveyed for our Guide to Developer Productivity said remote work has helped them be more productive, they still stated that team distribution is a significant blocker to developer collaboration.

As we head into a new year, software organizations are making plans, setting team goals, and revisiting their roadmaps for 2022. But for many teams, the tools, processes, and practices they rely on to collaborate continually fall short — and in some cases, are blocking them from shipping high quality code as quickly as they need to.

We’re proud to say that we use Mattermost to build Mattermost. Along that journey, we’ve encountered common challenges that many developers face, and designed solutions and workflows to help us optimize our productivity. Here are some examples.

Mattermost Boards started as an innovation project that came up during a hackathon we held in late 2020. At Mattermost, we’re focused on helping the world build better software by aligning teams, tools, and processes. We work like most other software development teams do, with stuff all over the place — in chat, emails, Google Docs, and systems like Jira and GitHub.