Gitcoin Product Collective - how to map software teams to workstreams

Big change is upon us and the momentum is exciting. The DAO is working on formalizing structure to take the charitable assets from Gitcoin Holdings, Grants 2.0 vision and strategy are getting feedback and the first stage of execution has begun with dPopp development underway, and Gitcoin Product Group is working more closely with Moonshot Collective forming Gitcoin Product Collective.

We are in a critical phase of building our muscle as an impact protocol DAO and we need to form protocol product development teams that are aligned, resilient, empowered, and self-organizing. There is experience to be drawn from that’s both positive and negative while still very much being on a frontier.

Here are some early thoughts on where we might start to build the foundation for these teams:

  • Launch each core component of Grants 2.0 with cross-functional teams (minimum developers, UX/UI design, product management)
  • Partner with strategic partner, Focused Labs, who brings years of experience building high performing, self organizing software teams to accelerate greenfield development of Grants 2.0 and set teams up for success to scale
  • Take learnings from the early days of Moonshot Collective and iterate towards being able to scale the impacts of rapid prototyping by having an explicit organizational operating system
  • Partner with DAOops to chart the tactical path for contributors to go from Holdings employees to DAO contributors without disruption to roadmap execution
  • Set OKRs for Szn 14 alongside all other workstreams
  • Start to run the Gitcoin Product Collective as a DAO workstream.

We think this might be a potential starting structure for this group:

In which Gitcoin Product Collective becomes a meta-workstream that supports holding continuity across highly dependent teams while allowing for smaller, self-organizing groups oriented around deep protocol domains. The meta-workstream facilitates technology specific support in service of the small, agile teams: architecture leadership, unified product strategy, DAO steward communication (single, holistic budgeting), DevRel, generative research…… The meta-workstream also serves as the entry point for new ideas (that don’t have a clear home within an existing product domain) such that they can be incubated and given a soft-landing upon finding product-ecosystem fit.

This is potential near-future state:

There are a number of remaining open questions/considerations:

  • Where does product marketing fit, meta or product team? Supported by MMM?
  • We need to make developers a first class citizen in the future, to enable people to build on top of Grants 2.0 - Tech writer for each team and/or a shared resource like DevRel?
  • dPopp is likely more of a utility we provide to the ecosystem and we desire it to be grown through open source contributions - should it become a workstream of it’s own or just get light, on-going support from the GPC?

Would love to hear thoughts and feedback on all of the above. Anyone particularly invested in the direction we take and interested in more real-time conversation, let us know in the comments.

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@lthrift I am really excited to see this topic & the directional approach to this mapping! One key aspect of the product collective may be to enable/play the role of a coordination/coach collective that help build rituals to (self-)regulate a set of co-dependent, high-impact, long-range focus teams. 3 axioms may be:

  • Decision making - enable decision analysis & tradeoffs (using a set of frameworks & gov tools).

  • Noise reduction - reduce distractions & enable team’s focus to foster high-impact work.

  • Metrics reporting - reduce organization bias by defining, collecting & visualizing KPIs (qualitative & quantitative) that enables quick understanding of directives/success/needed changes.

Set of activities that come to mind for the meta-GPC -

  • Coordination consistency - rituals within the product collective to ensure that same stories are replicated by the product team members across several groups (pattern of consistent signals).

  • GTM - marketing, legal & security (FDD) interlocks to ensure GTM planning & execution.

  • Stakeholder alignment - recognize, engage & maintain set of key stakeholders to ensure alignment on key goals & milestones.

  • Value sizing - collaborate & define a set of value parameters to sort & refine on ideas/Initial scoping & its impact.

Some of this may already be in place or being discussed. Excited for next steps & happy to collaborate further.

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