Answer 3 questions in APA format

• In what ways is Mozilla more effective at executing strategy than Google.org (case from Week 1)? Why are they more effective?
• What are the critical challenges that Debbie Cohen faces as chief  of people at Mozilla, specifically in terms of strategy execution and  alignment? What should she do to meet these challenges, and why?

 Explain how the knowledge and effective practice of cross-functional  strategic thinking can help individual stakeholders (people at all  levels of the organization and others outside the organization)  participate more fully in organizational efforts to improve long-term  performance and overall stakeholder engagement. 

Case study attached

Senior Lecturer Homa Bahrami prepared this case study with Case Writer Victoria Chang as the basis for class discussion rather than to

illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.

Copyright © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored,

or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the Berkeley-Haas Case Series.

Date: June 1, 2013

HO M A B AH R AM I

People Operations at Mozilla Corporation: Scaling a Peer-

to-Peer Global Community

I champion others to be their best selves.

—DEBBIE COHEN, CHIEF OF PEOPLE, MOZILLA CORPORATION

Our biggest challenge is to have an organization that relies on the

behaviors and interactions of millions of volunteers for its identity.

—GAR Y KOVACS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION

In April 2013, Debbie Cohen, Vice President and Chief of People at Mozilla Corporation, sat at her

cubicle space at the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, California, reflecting on her brief but

busy two-year tenure at Mozilla (often called “The Mozilla Project” or simply “The Project”). She

was preparing to meet with CEO Gary Kovacs to discuss the next phase of People efforts at Mozilla.

She marveled at what the mission-based open source
1
organization had achieved in just 15 years.

Mozilla had shown that valuable and competitive products could be produced as open source software

by a small number of employees who were globally distributed in more than 20 countries, along with

millions of global volunteers (called “contributors”) who built, tested, promoted, and supported

Mozilla’s products on their own time—all together referred to as “Mozillians”.

By the end of 2011, Mozilla had revenues of $163 million, up 33 percent from $123 million in 2010.

And by 2013, Mozilla had nine physical offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, London, Paris,

Auckland, Beijing, Tokyo, Vancouver, and Toronto, along with several internet-related products such

as Firefox (free internet browser), Firefox OS (an open operating system for mobile devices),

Marketplace (a creation and distribution platform for apps), Persona (a decentralized and secure

authentication system for the web), Thunderbird (a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news

client), and Webmaker (tools and education to help people move from using the web to making the

web).

1
Open source meant that anyone could use the software, access the code, and modify, improve, and redistribute the modified software.

B5774

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 2

In fact, Firefox, Mozilla’s flagship product had over 20 percent of worldwide usage share of web

browsers (around 450 million users), making it one of the top-used web browsers around the world.
2

Since its founding, Firefox has continued to garner praise from users and developers alike, while

gradually stealing market share away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and holding its own against

Google’s heavily-marketed Chrome which launched in 2008. By 2013, Mozilla had developed

Firefox OS, Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux, and Firefox for Android as well.

By the time Cohen arrived in April 2011, the organization had grown significantly. In fact, that year,

Mozilla doubled in size in terms of paid staff from 257 to 537 employees. By 2013, that number had

jumped to nearly 1,000. And by then, Cohen had not only developed an innovative, yet tailored

people strategy for Mozilla, but also implemented a series of people initiatives related to

compensation, onboarding, and development.

Chris Beard, Chief Marketing Officer reflected: “Mozilla started out as this one bedroom house and

the opportunity and our family started growing and we just kept on adding rooms. Some things like

plumbing or electrical didn’t work right and the foundation wasn’t strong enough to support a second

or third story that we started to envision. Debbie came in and put in place a much stronger, solid

foundation with a lot of opportunity to grow, and developed the plan on how to scale it—how to bring

people in, orient them, get them effective faster, and unlock their potential.”

As Cohen prepared for her meeting with Kovacs, she reflected on her hectic two years working at

such a unique and “cultish” organization. She wondered how the People function would continue to

support and scale a constantly growing and changing Mozilla, while maintaining and improving the

quality of Mozilla’s team and products, remaining competitive in the marketplace, and most

importantly, staying true to Mozilla’s core values and mission.

History: Netscape Roots

Mozilla’s history began on February 23, 1998, when Netscape Communications (who launched the

Netscape Navigator web browser in 1994)
3
created a project called Mozilla (which was the original

code name of the Netscape Navigator browser or an abbreviation of “Mosaic Killer”
4
). Netscape

created the Mozilla Project to coordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite, the open

source version of Netscape’s internet software, Netscape Communicator.
5
This act enabled anyone to

discuss, test, fix, and add to the program.

The intent of the Mozilla Project was to create a global open community of internet programmers to

fuel innovation in the browser market. According to Mozilla’s website in 2013: “Mozilla‘s vision of

the internet is a place where anyone can access information, a place where everyone can hack and

tinker; one that has openness, freedom and transparency; where users have control over their personal

data and where all minds have the freedom to create and to consume without walls or tight

restrictions…. Mozilla is mobilized to ensure the protection of the Web and to empower tomorrow’s

webmakers and Web users. Today, Mozilla is growing—with more employees, contributors, products,

and locations—to ensure that the Web remains an open, vibrant ecosystem. Because the Web is the

platform for building the world we want.”6

Within a year of Mozilla’s birth, contributors such as volunteer coders, testers, community builders,

2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox.

3
Netscape was the first commercially successful graphical browser, working on all operating systems such as Apple, Microsoft, etc.

4
Mosaic was the first popular web browser in 1993.

5
Netscape went public in 1995 but shortly thereafter, was dominated by Microsoft who had introduced its own browser, Internet Explorer for

free and bundled into its Windows operating system. Thus in January 1998, Netscape offered Navigator for free.
6
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2011/.

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 3

marketers, teachers, and evangelizers were actively engaged in the creation of features and new

functionality, along with new tools and even new browsers. They lived all over the world and some of

the fastest growing communities were in places such as the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

In 1998, AOL purchased Netscape, continuing to run Netscape and invest in Mozilla, but by late 2001,

AOL began reducing Mozilla’s paid staff to focus on other projects. In 2002, Mozilla launched

Mozilla 1.0 or a suite of products called the Mozilla Application Suite that included improvements to

the browser, an email client, and other applications included in the suite, but they had difficulty

garnering users who were still mostly using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mozilla 1.0 only acquired

around one to two million users.

Around this time, some Mozillians started a separate project called Phoenix, of which the goal was to

build a standalone web browser to compete directly with Internet Explorer. But because a company

named Phoenix Technologies had developed their own open-source browser and owned the trademark

for the name, Mozilla renamed the project Firebird.

On April 3, 2003, Mozilla announced the plan to shift focus from the Mozilla Suite to independent

applications for each function (Firebird for the web browser and Thunderbird for email). Originally,

Mozilla was created to be a technology provider for companies (such as Netscape) to battle against

Internet Explorer that Microsoft was giving away for free. However plans changed as AOL ended

support for the Mozilla Project in 2003. As a result, the Mozilla Foundation, an independent nonprofit

organization, was launched to focus on its own projects based on Mozilla’s technology platform.

As Mozilla prepared for its browser’s public release, the team discovered that an open source

relational database project also had the same name of Firebird. For the last time, on February 2004,

the browser’s name was changed to Firefox after the Asian red panda.

Firefox 1.0 was released in the fall of 2004 for the Mac, Windows, and Linux, in around 12 languages.

Within a year, the browser became a great success, downloaded over 100 million times. In fact, it

only took five days for Firefox to pass the one million download mark and one month to reach the 10

million mark. Within 16 months, Firefox 1.0 had captured 10 percent of the worldwide browser

market.
7
Since then, Mozilla has continuously released new versions with new features such as

malware and phishing protection, private browsing, and HTML5 support.

The appeal of Firefox was that it downloaded web pages more rapidly compared to other browsers.

Firefox also gained a reputation for being more secure from viruses that could attack a user’s

computer. And many liked using Firefox due to its open mission.

Firefox generated revenue from browser-based search through major search partners such as Google

and Yahoo, as well as corporate donations and grants. As a result of revenue generation, in 2005, the

Mozilla Foundation created a wholly-owned taxable subsidiary called the Mozilla Corporation. The

Foundation owned the intellectual property and the Corporation focused on building Firefox and other

products. By then, there were 39 employees, with three of those working at the Foundation.
8

By 2008, Firefox reached 20 percent worldwide market share and 25 percent by 2009, its five-year

anniversary (in the meantime, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had decreased from 70.5 percent in 2008

to 63.3 percent in 2009). By then, Firefox was available in more than 70 languages with much usage

outside of North America (with Europe at 34 percent).
9

7
Hoyt, Sutton, and Rao, op. cit., p. 5.

8
Ibid.

9
Ibid.

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 4

By December 2012, Firefox was one of the top three browsers, along with Internet Explorer and

Google’s Chrome. According to Net Market Share, Explorer was first with 55 percent, with Firefox

leading Chrome 20 to 18 percent. However, StatCounter estimated Chrome to be the top browser at

36 percent and Explorer to be second at 31 percent, and Firefox at 22 percent. Ultimately, they were

measuring different things—Net Market Share focused on unique visitors’ web browser hits, while

StatCounter focused on raw browser hits.
10

A Humanity-Based Philosophy

Cohen arrived at Mozilla armed with her decades of training in child and human development, having

started her career in early education at Stanford University where she had spent her time thinking

deeply about her impact on small children and their families, as well as on people interactions and

influence.

Later, she worked at the Department of the Interior developing an early childhood program. “I further

developed and refined my thinking about human potential from its earliest stages,” she said. “We

created environments for learning based on our belief that everyone is self-motivated to move and act

in the world in ways that give them meaning, and our jobs were to facilitate and encourage that

initiative, not get in the way…. And then I became more and more interested in work environments

for adults.”

Cohen’s professional journey led her to human resources, often consulting to organizations. She had

entered the field because she felt that traditional HR approaches and processes didn’t add enough

value to organizations. She began working at companies such as Time Warner and Razorfish. “I

became interested in how to create an environment that allows for one’s humanity to be present,” she

said. “And then I began doing work at Mozilla, in particular, looking at how we unlock what is

possible for individuals and what could happen for an organization where we don’t have unnecessary

boxes around people.”

She emphasized: “I wanted to make sure that we had humanity in the workplace, especially in a

technology organization where people might not be as socially comfortable interacting face-to-face. I

wanted to help create an organization that honored the humanity of each person and the potential that

we each have. And to create an environment where people feel like they are championed to bring

their best full self to the organization.”

The State of Mozilla

Mozilla was unlike many other organizations because of its open source environment and its

commitment to open community participation. In fact, 30 to 40 percent of its code was created by

contributors. Kovacs said: “There’s a fundamental assumption that a workforce is a staff working for

a company. Here at Mozilla, our talent base is a diverse collection of paid staff and volunteers

contributing towards a common objective.”

Kovacs also said that a fundamental assumption at most other organizations was that contribution to

an organization started and stopped based on a traditional employment equation. “I hire you, and your

contribution starts and when you leave, are fired, or laid off, your contribution stops. That assumption

doesn’t hold true at Mozilla,” he said. “Many of our paid staff started by volunteering, take a paid

position, and then might decide to volunteer again after that. That took me a while to get used to. I

later began to understand that just the nature of their relationship with Mozilla had changed, not

whether they were still committed and would continue to contribute.”

10

http://www.zdnet.com/the-web-browser-wars-continue-and-1-is-well-that-depends-on-whom-you-ask-7000009305/.

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 5

Because of these unique assumptions about Mozilla’s talent base, Cohen didn’t have the typical HR

role where she was tasked to structure HR for a staff that was compensated and rewarded by an

organization. Instead, “she has to build a community and culture from the outside in,” said Kovacs.

“That’s very different from a traditional culture of, ‘here’s who we are, and project that out.’”

When Cohen arrived, Mozilla was still at an early developmental stage in terms of HR (named the

“People organization” by Kovacs). Mozilla was one fifth the size as it was by 2013 in terms of paid

staff and one quarter the size in terms of contributors. Patrick Finch, the Director of Product

Marketing Strategy who was based in Sweden and who managed people all over the world in places

like Vancouver, Seattle, and Berlin, said: “When I joined Mozilla in 2008, there were only 100

employees and we knew everyone and most communication happened asynchronously.”

Very little traditional HR structures and processes existed at that time. Cohen said: “Moreover, there

were people at Mozilla that didn’t believe that they needed anything. There was a very casual and

personal feel to the organization.” She added: “We had a rudimentary structure in place that included

recruiting and some basic operations so people could get paid, but we didn’t have people who were

HR specialists, although they were well-intended and smart people. When you start scaling for the

long-term, you have to do things differently. This is typical for a company that is coming out of its

startup phase.”

Cohen’s overall strategy was to put into place, “infrastructure” that allowed the organization to grow

and scale without a lot of “false starts”. However, she added: “The tension was, how do you stay true

to your roots, who you want to be in the world, and what you stand for? What I found upon arrival

was a tendency to put in a more traditional hierarchical structure. You could feel the tension within

the Project. Additionally, we were growing and people were very suspicious of the People team,

believing we would function like a more traditional HR group, like the police, and focus on

compliance, control, and process. Words like ‘process’ made people very nervous and

uncomfortable.”

Mozilla was also comprised mostly of technology areas and engineering employees. Because of the

predominance of engineering employees, Cohen said engineers tended to be a part of a “club” and

those entering the organization as non-technologists were “alien” to people there. “The way we

thought, our language, and our interactions were foreign to them,” said Cohen.

Organizationally, Mozilla’s geo-distributed structure also led to a unique set of challenges and

opportunities, according to Beard: “Although there is likely an organizational overhead cost to being a

distributed organization and it makes it harder for us to respond holistically, once we turn, we’re able

to bring a lot more force in a distributed way to our efforts.” Beard provided the example of

marketing campaigns: “We have hundreds and thousands of people doing different marketing

campaigns around the world in a local way and sharing back the results compared to our competitors

who are structured more traditionally. So we have a massive incubator and when it’s working, we can

put some juice behind it and scale it.”

From a business perspective, the organization was buzzing from the recent launch of Firefox 4, its first

re-launch of Firefox in over two years. “Change was happening everywhere,” said Cohen. “We were

working to stay relevant as a product and signaling the shift into the mobile ecosystem. And we were

growing quickly which began to strain the peer-to-peer relationships between our contributors and our

paid staff. In our organization, credibility is gained by solving someone’s problem. I knew I had to

move quickly for the People function to gain credibility.”

The First Year: “Assess, Build, Then Execute”

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 6

Even though Cohen knew that there were “big needs” such as infrastructures for compensation, she

eased her way into those issues by first trying to “really understand” what the business was, how it

worked, how it was organized, what mattered to the organization, and how people worked.

Importantly, Cohen didn’t believe in “repurposing” or “rinsing and repeating” what she or other

members of the People team had used elsewhere. Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all mentality, she

believed in “asking powerful questions and then deciding what the infrastructure should look like to

best support the organization.”

She also believed in a “less is more” philosophy when implementing People-related programs and

initiatives. “I see so many HR functions adding more and more to show their value, impact, and ROI,

but I believe that your organization will tell you what it needs through repeat customers. Repeat

customers show that you are offering them something that has value to them.”

Initially, Mozilla employees were apprehensive to talk to Cohen and Mihca Degele, Cohen’s first

People team hire, but gradually, they began to respond. Cohen said: “As trained coaches, our beliefs

were that they themselves actually had the answers. We asked powerful questions, guided them, and

let them find their way.” Degele added: “They began seeing us not as scary HR or the police, but

people that they could come ask for help.”

As Cohen began to understand Mozilla, her strategy was to find the “greatest leverage point” in order

to make the biggest impact. And during implementation, her plan was to “put in a layering piece at

the greatest point of need, in the simplest way possible.” She added: “I don’t need to roll out an entire

system. I can roll out the piece that, in the moment, helps people to have the necessary conversation.

And then we can roll out the other pieces when they are most helpful to the organization, individual,

or group. This means that although adoption might be slower, the saturation and value might actually

be higher.”

Employee Development: Talent Assessments

Early on, one of the most frequently asked questions to Cohen was, “Where is my career going and

how am I going to get there?” Cohen didn’t have the answer since Mozilla hadn’t provided any

focused development for its people, and in particular manager training or development to those in

designated leadership roles.

Cohen took the opportunity to conduct a workforce planning exercise, rebranded as “Talent

Assessments”. “We couldn’t call it ‘workforce planning’ because no one would have talked to us,”

she said. The Talent Assessment initiative allowed Cohen and managers to have a “very refined

conversation about the organization and its needs.” “We learned that we have a high value in this

organization of thought leadership and distributed knowledge; mentoring and managing; and that we

were promoting people who didn’t necessarily want to be managers,” said Cohen.

Cohen and Degele conducted over 200 interviews of managers and directors over a period of six

weeks. The exercise allowed them to learn about the different functions, people needs over the next

18 months, as well as to translate those needs into skills, knowledge, and characteristics of the people

who were needed going forward. The goal was to create a non-threatening way for managers to get to

know the People team as a business partner.

After that, they homed in on individuals and discussed their talents and development areas and

whether individuals were meeting the needs of the organization. “We gave people a framework in

which to have a conversation with us,” said Cohen. “It wasn’t just, ‘Let’s talk about Tim.’ By asking

people what they needed first, we provided some structure for the conversation.”

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 7

At the end of the Talent Assessment process, the team asked hiring managers to use a 9-box grid

typically used for talent succession (where performance was on one axis and leadership potential on

the other axis) and they asked managers to plot their people. The intent was not to use the grid for

succession planning, but rather as a framework for Cohen and Degele to help managers see how the

aggregate of their people contributed to the team, and where gaps existed.

She then sent out a memo to the organization stating that every employee and every manager needed

to have a performance conversation. Employees didn’t receive ratings or evaluations; Cohen just

wanted them to have a conversation to get direction and to grow. The memo purposefully went to

everyone beyond managers to create a sense of shared accountability.

The four things that Cohen wanted discussed were: 1) Where do you feel you have made the most

significant impact to Mozilla over the last six months; 2) Where is it that you have felt most

challenged and what could you have done differently; 3) Where do you want to grow; and 4) Where

are you the most satisfied and dissatisfied? For many employees, this was the first time that they had

had this type of conversation with their managers at Mozilla.

One of the biggest challenges related to Talent Assessments and employee development was coaching

people to leave the organization. Cohen said: “It was difficult for our people to reconcile the fact that

we were an open and inclusive company, but then asking someone to move on. We got to the point

where people understood that you can be passionate about our purpose but not be constructively

moving us forward. We believe everyone has the potential to be successful, but that not everyone is

the right fit at the right time for that full potential to be realized and people seemed to accept and

understand that.”

Part of employee development too was finding a tool that would provide performance feedback and

support the alignment of paid and volunteer activities. It also needed, over time, to support the annual

merit review process and the organization’s bonus program.

“I spent the first year talking with different vendors about their tools and really wanted to rule out a lot

of traditional, process-heavy tools where employees would just roll their eyes and reject the tools,”

said Cohen. After narrowing the tools down to two options, Cohen invited members of Mozilla to

evaluate the options, ultimately choosing a tool that had both the capabilities of goal alignment and

performance feedback. The tool also had a strong social component for recognition and iterative

interaction, such as instant feedback from peer groups or the ability to issue badges for accomplishing

tasks or lending a hand.

During the first round of implementation, 100 percent of the organization activated their accounts and

98 percent completed their self-assessments. Instead of using traditional ratings like numbers, they

created descriptive phrases like “All over it”, “Getting it”, or “Not getting it”. The goal was to create

conversations around performance and improvement opportunities.

While the tool had the capabilities to be open to the volunteer community, as of 2013, Cohen had not

provided access for this subset of Mozilla. Cohen and the team were working with the tool partner to

limit access within the tool to goal alignment and the social networking components. There was a

need to mitigate the legal sensitivities of having paid and volunteer contributors in the same

performance feedback tool.

A Tailored Compensation Program

At the time, Mozilla had very little compensation infrastructure in place. The infrastructure consisted

of six levels of progression, but they were vaguely defined, and there were two compensation

structures—one for technology (engineers) and the other for non-engineers (very few).

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 8

Cohen’s goal was to leverage some of the information garnered from the Talent Assessments to shape

a compensation conversation and infrastructure. “We didn’t want to use an off-the-shelf

compensation program that was just dropped into the organization to absorb and use,” she said. “I

also didn’t want to break anything that might be working and needed to figure out how to scale the

compensation program.”

One of the most challenging aspects of compensation in an open source culture such as Mozilla was

striking the balance between being open about as much as possible and keeping some things, such as

individual salaries, private. “We tried really hard to be open where we could and we are still trying to

be consciously open,” said Cohen. “It’s not conventional in HR to do things in the open and we are

still learning.”

The team launched a compensation review and learned more about Mozilla’s culture. They learned

that very few people asked for salary increases and in some cases, people had gone years without an

increase. All the while, annual turnover remained less than five percent. The team learned through

limited exit interviews of a culture that was very “self-deprecating”. People didn’t ask for more

because they were surrounded by amazingly smart people who were committed to Mozilla’s

purpose—people often were willing to set aside their personal needs for the good of the Project. “An

unintended consequence of this culture, however, is that we left people ripe for a smart recruiter to

pick them off,” said Cohen.

She summarized her team’s efforts up to that point: “We did the performance feedback, we did a

compensation review and this gave us an inventory of where we needed to strengthen our management

layer.” The process began to help Cohen create a dual career path—an individual contributor track

and a more traditional manager track.

This dual career path allowed people to progress in the Mozilla organization without having to default

into management. Cohen’s theory was that the management team would be even stronger since

people would self-select into management. The team implemented KPMTL or how they assessed

proficiency required at each job level, where K stood for knowledge, P for proficiency, M for

mentorship and management, and TL for thought leadership and leadership. What this meant was that

people could navigate their professional progressions with a deep understanding for what each level

represented, as well as grow in their capabilities and impact without moving into the management

track.

Cohen’s team then worked with managers to create job families. Sylvie Brossard, director of Total

Rewards said: “We gave our managers a list of classic job families on the market but we used way

more than the classic members. And the way they are written and the way they read is definitely not

the same thing that you will find with many other companies. They are more tailored and fun.” Next

came the more typical compensation work related to building a compensation matrix and

infrastructure based on marketplace analysis.

“We were pretty transparent about levels and jobs,” said Cohen. “Our approach was again a little

different. Although a lot of the tools and construct of thinking was the same as what the industry uses,

how we went about building it with the organization so they both understood it and would rapidly

adopt it, was very different.”

After the exercise, Cohen’s group was flooded with people contacting them, asking for help and

asking questions because a relationship of trust had developed. “This experience showed our people

that they had been heard and that there were things that we were acting on,” said Cohen.

A Global, Scalable, Needs-Based Onboarding Program

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 9

Given that Mozilla was hiring hundreds of paid staff and had a growing community of contributors

around the world, Cohen felt there was a huge need for an onboarding program. “As a company, how

do we want people to feel about joining us? A candidate goes through a very intense job interview

period, gets the offer, and is excited, but their connective tissue is with the recruiter who hired them or

with the hiring manager,” she said. “And then once a signed offer is received, that person is dangling

out there for weeks or months, appears all excited on day one, only to be put into a three hour benefits

orientation. Why on the first day does HR have to pin you into a room for three hours and talk about

benefits? Write it down and give it to me ahead of time. On my first day, I want to meet my team, get

to my desk, start getting productive, and meet other people.”

Beard too emphasized the importance of onboarding: “I think onboarding is something that can be

undervalued, but given the complexity of our organization and the scale we’re operating at now, we

need to move faster. And in order to move faster, people have to understand the whole system, all the

moving parts, and how to affect them. It’s not good enough anymore to just hand someone a laptop

and say, ‘go figure it out.’”

Although Cohen began working on a comprehensive onboarding system early on, it wasn’t until

January 2013 that the system was rolled out. “This was a beast of a project,” laughed Cohen. “It took

us a long time to build and we had a lot of false starts.”

When designing a new onboarding program, Cohen found inspiration from her own experiences when

she first arrived. “Everyone knows how things are done but you can’t find it out and no one’s going to

tell you,” she recalled. “Everyone had strong relationships with each other and the assumption of the

core was, ‘Well of course that’s the way that happens here,’ without offering explicit context.” Her

own experience had left her feeling “alien” in a somewhat “cultish” culture. Degele described her

onboarding experience too: “I had a two hour HR orientation about things that I wasn’t going to

remember. It wasn’t organized in a very helpful way, and then I was given equipment and an IT

orientation that was geared towards engineers.”

Cohen and her team set out to develop a global, scalable onboarding program that had core content to

support any Mozillian including staff of the Corporation or Foundation, and volunteer contributors so

that “all of us had the same baseline of information and acclimated and assimilated into the

organization in a similar kind of way,” said Cohen.

One main goal of the onboarding program was to develop a relationship with people before they even

arrived at Mozilla. Cohen said: “Part of the excitement of my job was that this wasn’t just about paid

staff—it was an opportunity to touch volunteer contributors too. The other part was that we had to

scale this thing—we couldn’t have people flying in from around the world to Mountain View for

onboarding.”

How the Onboarding System Worked

Once a new hire returned their signed offer letter, core employee data was entered into the HRIS

database. This repository was the source of all employee data. It then pushed relevant information,

such as the person’s work location, hire date, and level, to the onboarding system. Within days, the

new hire received access to the onboarding system along with a welcome that “introduces them to the

tribe.”

Along with their “warm welcome”, the system supported workflow, provided the new hire with

employment forms and paperwork relevant to a particular geography and to their new role that they

needed to complete and return to the organization in a timely fashion. The goal was to front-load as

much administrative business as possible at a time when new hires were most excited, as well as to

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 10

give them information in bite-sized chunks.

This information flow went from T-14 all the way through 60 days after the employee started

working. In some cases, such as students where the lead time could be longer, the onboarding

interaction system went back farther to T-30 to get new hires excited.

New hires even received a funny session about Mozilla’s “ism’s” or quirky Mozilla-specific

vocabulary since these were a part of Mozilla’s unspoken cultural norm. New hires were also

informed of online chat rooms and forums where they could start filing bugs as a way to get their feet

wet before they arrived. They could also view a Mozilla history video that discussed governance and

the organization so they could feel like they were “part of the tribe” before they began.

Beyond administration, another key goal was to provide emotional support during different points of

the onboarding experience. For example, on an employee’s first day, a “Go” button lit up, they

received another type of welcome message, and three additional learning tabs that resembled folders

automatically appeared on the system—Learn, Grow, and Mastery.

Those tabs were targeted to help new hires at various stages after they arrived at Mozilla. On the

Learn page, a scavenger hunt-type of game was presented while providing new relevant information.

New hires were encouraged to find three people in the directory and send them an email, for example.

The Grow button lit up in the fifth week and was designed to help employees feel empowered and

confident when they might not yet be feeling that way. The Mastery button was about giving back

and lit up on the 60
th

day. After the 60
th

day, employees were formally onboarded. Each new hire

was asked to fill out an exit survey so Cohen and the team could continuously improve the experience,

and each new hire was asked to share their learning to other employees through Capture Mozilla, a

video format where people could distribute knowledge back into the organization.

The automated tool also fed to a new hire’s managers, prompting them to engage with their new hire

so that they acclimated and assimilated easily. Moreover, the tool prompted relationships with the

new hire’s HR business partner, so that the pair could engage in different ways.

Cohen and her team worked with a third-party software company to tailor and implement its

onboarding program. “We pushed this vendor far beyond their comfort level,” said Cohen. “They

had never seen a company do this involved of an onboarding integration.” Cohen’s team worked with

the vendor team to develop the content, the work flow, and the technology interface. She added: “We

worked together to design a different kind of experience—one where the experience was supported by

a system based on the new hire’s needs, not HR’s needs.”

Onboarding for Contributors

In 2013, Cohen brought a demo of the new onboarding tool to a MozCamp in Latin America

(MozCamp was where contributors and paid staff convened to train other contributors, celebrate their

work, and strengthen a community). The regional leadership told Cohen that there was too much

information for their contributors, especially at the beginning phases of their engagement. “They told

me that perhaps six months after a volunteer had been contributing and wanted to deepen their

involvement might be a better time to provide them with onboarding content,” said Cohen. “This was

an example where we thought we knew what might be helpful, but we discovered we were wrong

when we asked community leadership.”

Thus Cohen’s team focused on re-designing the onboarding tool for contributors. The tool had larger

issues related to language since many of the contributors didn’t speak English. Degele said: “How do

we give them something that is actually helpful in their native language? It is one of the barriers we

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 11

are still trying to navigate and while our business language is English, that makes sense for our paid

staff and not necessarily for the contributor community.” Moreover, every contributor community

needed something different. Some had their own portal for onboarding already and others had their

own processes. “How do we provide a customized experience for each community to make it their

own?” asked Degele. At the time of the case study, Cohen’s team was working with the community

to address these concerns.

Learning and Development in a Culture of Distributed Knowledge

As Cohen settled into her job, she began to think about employee learning and development. She

investigated hiring an organizational development expert but changed her mind when she realized that

this would bring a lot of “old school thinking” into Mozilla. Instead, she hired someone with a

training background who also had a history of deploying training through technology. After more

than a year of false starts, Cohen decided it was time to take another approach.

Since Mozilla had a culture that valued distributed knowledge, many people were already sharing

knowledge and developing each other informally through brown bag lunches and informal mentoring.

Instead of using a more traditional construct of a learning and development department, she paused

and observed what was already in place. “What we began to notice was that Mozilla has a very strong

culture of distributed knowledge,” she said. “We have wickedly smart people who want very much to

show others what they know and to help others be their best.”

Capture Mozilla

At the end of 2012, Cohen and her team launched the Capture Mozilla Project as a pilot program, a

project that used video to capture and share knowledge (from know-how to cultural) across the

Mozilla community. Rodino Anderson and Dia Bondi were responsible for the Capture Mozilla

project. Bondi summarized: “The Capture Mozilla Project was born to try to scale knowledge across

the organization making implicit knowledge explicit through the use of short video and storytelling.”

Specifically, the goal of Capture Mozilla was: “To generate brief interactive videos that give the

know-how Mozillians need to act quickly; to collect existing and new video from the community that

shares knowledge; to use a self-serve model that gives Mozillians easy access to relevant knowledge

at whatever level of contribution they engage in; and to make video fun, interactive, and easy to

share.”
11

Contributors to the Capture Mozilla project could take and submit videos in four categories—How-to-

Videos; Grow Yourself; Grow the Project; and Culture and Context. For example, in the How to

category, there were technical videos such as “How to File a Bug” alongside videos like “How to Use

the Espresso Machine in Toronto”. The Capture Mozilla project had over 20 videos by 2013, some of

which were created by the Capture Mozilla staff, such as showing Mozillians how to make videos.

“The Capture Mozilla Project is a beautiful example of how we are a knowledge-based company and

that we have a lot of knowledge already inside the organization,” said Cohen. “So rather than thinking

about adding to it, what if we create a condition for our people to share knowledge that fits our values

and our internal motivation to continuously improve and expand?”

Importantly, the Capture Mozilla Project was designed to be scalable in a distributed organization: “I

also wanted our contributors to both participate and consume because then they are going to become

stronger components of the Mozilla Project as well,” said Cohen. “Why would we only develop our

11

https://air.mozilla.org/pages/capture-mozilla.

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 12

paid staff when we have this army of people committed to our mission? And how do we embolden

and enable them to be at their best too?”

Peer-to-Peer Leadership: The LEAD Program

The culture at Mozilla was also one where everyone could be a self-generated leader. Beard said:

“Because we can’t have a traditional organization where decision-making is centralized, we need

leaders that are empowered to go and change the world.”

But before Cohen had arrived, leaders had not received any development training. “Our managers

were doing the best that they could because they are good-hearted fabulous people who really care,”

said Cohen. “However, people in designated leadership roles had never been given any help in

thinking about how they were going to lead and who they wanted to be as leaders.”

After her first year at Mozilla, Cohen wanted to create a leadership development initiative, but she

wanted to be careful about how she approached it—again, not desiring to do the “same-old, same-

old.” Cohen recruited Athena Katsaros and Kate Roeske to co-create the development program. She

had met the pair while at the Coaches Training Institute in San Rafael, California and felt that they had

similar values around coaching and helping people reach their full potential. The team set out to

create a leadership program that they hoped to test and possibly roll out as a larger initiative if it was

successful.

Katsaros added: “We fit with Mozilla really well because we are very peer-to-peer too. We’re trained

in ‘coactive’ coaching which involves a complete respect for who is sitting in front of us and not

having a fixed idea of what they need, as well as the idea that there’s nothing to fix.”

The team wanted to avoid using an approach where a list of leadership competencies would be handed

to people but wanted to create a transformational program, not a transactional program. They didn’t

want the program to be limited to giving leaders skills or building on strengths, but rather to be

focused on self-reflection and deep connection with the people they work with, and to create an

environment where people could change the way they think and behave in a positive and authentic

way.

Cohen added: “I believe giving people competencies limits their potentials because it locks people

into a particular mold of what a leader should look like. What happens if there is an M&A, leadership

change, or the markets take a left-hand turn? Do you then have the robust level of skills at the

leadership level to give you the agility to bend your knees and ride with the wave?”

Instead of a specific leadership paradigm, they set out to create an exploratory leadership model that

allowed people to uncover who they really are, as well as who they want to be. “If we created a

condition that let people be vulnerable enough in a work environment with their peers to do that, what

would be possible for them?” asked Cohen. “And if we got our leaders to awareness of their full

potential, then what is possible for Mozilla?”

They named the new leadership development program LEAD (Leadership, Exploration, and

Discovery) and all Mozilla paid staff who were director-level or above (50 people) were invited to

pick from two LEAD cohorts (the cohorts averaged 25 participants each). The one ground rule was

that participants could not miss a single of the four sessions (10 days total) that spanned across seven

months. The idea was that learning happens intermittently, not over a fire drill five-day period.

Participants were provided one-on-one coaching between sessions.

LEAD Sessions

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 13

The first session involved a 360-degree diagnostic called the “Leadership Circle Profile” and focused

on the leaders, asking them who they wanted to be, what impact they wanted to make, and what gaps

they saw in their skills. The team also brought in members of the Steering Committee to humanize

leadership challenges at Mozilla, according to Katsaros and Roeske: “One of our objectives was to

have the directors feel empowered rather than passive and to step up as leaders in the organization.

By exposing them to the Steering Committee who shared what it was like to be a leader in Mozilla,

the directors saw the humorous, lonely, and human side and the light bulbs just went off. The cohort

saw that the Steering Committee was doing the best they could, that they don’t have all the answers,

and it was their job as directors to inform the Steering Committee if they thought something should be

done differently.”

The second session, called “Big Picture”, focused on getting the leaders to lift their chins up and focus

on the entire ecosystem, and to understand the meaning of strategy. A Berkeley-Haas professor

conducted a mini-MBA session on strategy and many such as Finch and participant Jinghua Zhang felt

that the session was very useful. A key value-add of that session was expanding the participants’

breadth to think about strategy for Mozilla as a whole versus just their particular areas.

Between sessions two and three, participants were given the freedom and permission to identify an

organizational problem they wanted to fix. When they returned to session three called “Leadership

Presence”, the coaches used a “yes, and skill drill” exercise which taught leaders how to move beyond

what was wrong to what was possible. Dia Bondi of Capture Mozilla focused on teaching the leaders

how to deliver the arc of their story so they would be ready by the third session to present to the cohort

with true, authentic impact.

Also in session three, participants took part in the “I Am” typing exercise, borrowed from

improvisation. The fun and crazy exercises allowed peers to type each other. “The premise is we are

who we are and instead of spending a lot of time trying to be who we think we should be or a certain

type of leader, we tell our leaders that they are most impactful when they show up as their authentic

selves,” said Cohen. The next day of the session, coaches led leaders to identify their “lids” and

limiting beliefs and focus on what would happen if those limitations were lifted.

Finch, who participated in the LEAD program right after assuming a new leadership role, found the

program incredibly useful: “Overall, the program changed my leadership style. It helped me to

appreciate ways in which I might be different from other people and to focus on things that I bring and

to lead from those strengths, rather than feel that you have to be perfect—of course none of us are

perfect.”

The fourth session was called, “You are an Agent of Change” where the coaches discussed the arc of

the hero’s journey. Participants also made a declaration at the end, of who they want to be, who they

are, and what they are letting go of. “It is one of the most moving closing sessions I have ever seen,”

said Cohen. “During our first cohort, I don’t think we had a dry eye in the house. They became so

committed and now have accountability groups, book groups, and all the connective tissue, which was

exactly what we had hoped for.”

Part of the sessions’ success was that the coaches met each night to redesign for the next day based on

what had happened that day. Even the cohorts differed from each other based on the different needs

of the leaders. The result was anything but a cookie-cutter curriculum. “Our leadership program is

transformative and unique and changes lives,” said Cohen. “It created for the organization a common

language and now the directors self-manage at their director’s meetings and the executive team is able

to pull back from the table more.”

LEAD Across Mozilla

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 14

The LEAD team also invited contributor leaders to participate. Kovacs said: “Debbie designed the

LEAD program from the outside in as well by inviting key contributors who had risen through the

meritocracy.” Three contributors chose to participate and “beautiful things happened,” said Katsaros

and Roeske. The contributors all had successful experiences and one was even promoted in her

regular job during the time she was in one of the cohorts due to the impact of the leadership program

on her development.

Viking Karwur, a contributor from Indonesia after session three said: “This is so incredible to be

seen.” Roeske added: “Here was this contributor who was incredibly humbled to be a part of this

experience and something shifted in him by being typed and that this group saw him, which in turn

gave him confidence that I don’t think he would have had if he had not done the program.”

During the first cohort, Cohen’s executive team saw strong results and asked Cohen to implement

something similar for them too. Purposely, Cohen didn’t start LEAD with the senior management

team and try to push the program down into the organization. Instead, she looked for the biggest

leverage point where she could enter the organization and expect the largest scale change in the

shortest amount of time. “These 50 people lead the rest of the organization and if I moved them

forward, then we all move forward,” she said.

The LEAD team implemented a full day off-site for the executive team and planned to develop a

LEAD program for those leaders in the near future, along with a third cohort of directors who had

been recently hired or promoted into those roles. And Cohen was in the process of implementing the

TRIBE, which was a rework of the LEAD program for anyone at Mozilla, including all contributors.

Since Mozilla had a culture of distributed knowledge, some directors who graduated from the program

also started their own groups. One was called Hacking Management, a meetup where anyone could

join and talk about management ideas. Some directors also shared their knowledge on Capture

Mozilla.

The Future

By 2013, Mozilla had existed for 15 years with humble roots as a side project within Netscape. But

by then, the organization had many more people, both paid and volunteer, more functions and

products, with some products developed in partnership with other organizations, and an even more

global organization. Mozilla was also moving from a very traditional horizontal functional

organization to a very active R&D organization to support the continued growth and evolution of the

web.

By that time, Cohen had transformed the People organization in a short two years in a way that

honored and respected Mozilla’s rich culture and history, and in a way that guided and motivated

Mozilla’s knowledge workers around the world.

She felt that the organization was embarking on a reflection period of, “who are we and who do we

want to be?” She added: “What I am beginning to sense from the Project is strain because we haven’t

yet explicitly restructured to support each of the different product lines and ways of working. What

will the structure of our Project look like in the next three to five years and how do we organize our

people, both paid staff and contributors, to meet the needs of our products and our users, and to

optimize how work happens to fit our business needs? And how do we scale in a meaningful and

impactful way, while being true to the core mission and purpose of the Project?”

Up next for Cohen’s team was to more fully develop her own People team, as well as to focus on

“global connectedness” with the goal of expanding the capacity of the Mozilla Project through

engagement of both paid and volunteer staff in partnership with Chris Beard and his engagement

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 15

team. As Cohen reflected on her brief, but whirlwind experience at Mozilla, she wondered whether

she and her team had done all the most optimal things and more importantly, whether her areas of

focus for the future were the right ones.

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 16

Case Discussion Questions

1. What are the critical challenges that Debbie Cohen faces as the Chief of People at

Mozilla?

2. How would you describe Mozilla’s cultural and organizational DNA?

3. What are the specific value-added benefits of the various people initiatives introduced by
Cohen? Evaluate the initiatives that Cohen has put into place? Which initiative is likely
to have the most impact?

4. What are potential barriers to Cohen’s success?

5. What do you think the lessons are for other knowledge-based organizations?

6. In hindsight, what do you think Cohen should have done differently?

7. What should Cohen do next? Why?

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Exhibit 1 Selected Mozilla Community Milestones

 July 31, 2009 – 1,000,000,000th Firefox download

 March 31, 2008 – The Mozilla project celebrates its 10th anniversary

 February 19, 2008 – Mozilla Messaging, the new mail focused subsidiary of the Mozilla

Foundation, begins operations

 December 28, 2007 – AOL announces that there will be no further releases of Netscape

Navigator and recommends that Navigator users switch to Firefox

 October 19, 2005 – Firefox surpasses 100 million downloads just before its 1st anniversary

 August 3, 2005 – The Mozilla Corporation is created as a wholly owned subsidiary of the

Mozilla Foundation

 July 2, 2005 – The community led SeaMonkey project takes over development of former

Mozilla Application Suite code

 March 4, 2005 – Mozilla China is founded to tap into China’s thriving Firefox community

 September 14, 2004 – Mozilla establishes the Bug Bounty program to reward contributors for

discovering bugs and helping continually improve Mozilla’s products

 August 18, 2004 – Mozilla Japan is founded to create a foothold in Asia and foster the

growing community in Japan

 February 17, 2004 – Mozilla Europe is founded to spur Mozilla’s community, mindshare and

market share in Europe

 July 15, 2003 – The Mozilla Foundation is born with a $2 million start-up support from

America Online’s Netscape division; Mitch Kapor pledges support and heads up the board of

directors

 April 2, 2003 – A new roadmap is posted that details the switch from developing an

integrated suite to developing Firefox and Thunderbird as separate applications

 September 19, 2001 – Mozilla relicensing begins, more than 6000 NPL files are relicensed

under an MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license

 April 7, 2000 – First Mozilla Developer Day is hosted at Netscape

 March 18, 1999 – America Online acquires Netscape Communications Corporation

 October 26, 1998 – mozilla.org posts product roadmap that includes next browser release

based on Gecko and a cross platform user interface

 March 31, 1998 – Netscape Communicator source code is posted on the Internet via

mozilla.org

 February 23, 1998 – The mozilla.org project is launched by Netscape

Major Software Releases

 June 30, 2009 – Firefox 3.5 released

 June 17, 2008 – Firefox 3.0 is released

 April 18, 2007 – Thunderbird 2.0 is released as a major update to the free, open source email

client

 January 18, 2007 – SeaMonkey 1.1 is made available

 October 24, 2006 – Mozilla releases Firefox 2.0

 January 30, 2006 – SeaMonkey 1.0 is released

 January 12, 2006 – Thunderbird 1.5 is made available

 November 29, 2005 – Mozilla releases Firefox 1.5

 December 7, 2004 – Mozilla rolls out Thunderbird 1.0 providing users with an alternative,

free email client

 November 9, 2004 – Mozilla Firefox 1.0 goes live, allowing users to experience the Web in a
whole new way

 June 17, 2004 – Mozilla 1.7 is launched with many improvements to speed and standards

support

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 18

 June 30, 2003 – Mozilla 1.4 is released with popup blocking, junk mail filtering, and many

improvements

 September 23, 2002 – Phoenix 0.1 is released, the first official version of a stand-alone

browser that will later be renamed to Firefox

 June 5, 2002 – Mozilla 1.0 is released – the browser which is the precursor to today’s wildly

popular Firefox Web browser

 November 14, 2000 – Netscape 6 is released and is the first official Netscape product based

on open source code

Source: http://www.mozilla.org/about/timeline.html.

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Exhibit 2 Levels of Mozilla Contributors

Core Contributor

A core contributor is someone who has a leadership position in one or more Mozilla

project areas.

 Examples: The German l10n lead, a Mozilla Rep, a module owner or peer, a

Mozilla employee

 Estimated size: hundreds of people

 Mission impact: Core contributors have made major contributions to support the

mission through their contributions of time and skill. They give Mozilla reach in

terms of scope, geography and influence far beyond what could be achieved

through directly staffing an organization.

Active Contributor

An active contributor is someone who has volunteered substantial time to a Mozilla

activity that involves interactions with others within the last 12 months.

 Examples: Someone who answers Firefox questions on SUMO, Mozilla’s

community-powered support site, helps an average of 10,000 Firefox users per

week, someone who files bugs with Nightly builds, someone who localizes

Mozilla websites, someone on the Credits page, etc.

 Estimated size: thousands of people

 Mission impact: Active contributors directly support the mission through their

contributions of time and skill, and provide Mozilla with the ability to move

forward with a wide range of programs and projects.

Casual Contributor

A casual contributor is someone who has volunteered small amounts of time in an

activity that doesn’t necessarily involve interactions with other community members.

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MOZILLA PEOPLE 20

 Examples: Someone who participates in Test Pilot studies, someone who has

submitted feedback on input.mozilla.org, someone who has created a persona,

someone who has submitted a crash report

 Estimated size: hundreds of thousands of people

 Mission impact: In aggregate, casual contributors create real value for the

Mozilla, spreading the word, providing decision-informing data and more.

Supporter

A supporter is someone who has shown an interest in Mozilla without having made a

substantial contribution back to the community yet.

 Examples: Someone who donates $5 through Join Mozilla, someone who has

downloaded a Firefox beta, someone who has liked Firefox on Facebook

 Estimated size: millions of people

 Mission impact: Supporters advance the mission just like users, but they’ve taken

the additional step to start educating themselves about Mozilla and by definition

they are aware of some ways to get more involved.

User

A user is someone who uses Mozilla products but may not be aware of Mozilla’s mission

or that there are volunteer opportunities they could get involved with.

 Example: Someone who uses Firefox as their primary browser.

 Estimated size: hundreds of millions of people

 Mission impact: Users help advance our mission indirectly, although the people

using our products may not be aware of how they are helping or that there even is

a mission.

Source: Quoted directly from, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community.

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Exhibit 3 Mozilla Contributors around the World

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Exhibit 3 cont. Mozilla Contributors around the World

Source: Mozilla.org.

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Exhibit 4 Community Map and Community Sites

Source: Mozilla.org.

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Exhibit 5 Mozilla Wiki and Mozillians.org

Source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Main_Page and https://mozillians.org/en-US/.

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Exhibit 6 Mozilla Onboarding Website

Source: Mozilla.

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Exhibit 7 Capture Mozilla Website

Source: Mozilla.

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