Brief Summary
We ended the 3rd quarter of 2021 with deep alignment across the team and momentum on several key projects. Over the next quarter we plan to grow the team significantly by investing in our instructional capacity and doubling down on software development.
Software products like stats.gallery and near.academy are starting to mature with new and engaging game mechanics being added as well as a design overhaul on near.academy forthcoming.
We also have a few new products in the works that we plan to announce in Q4 which we hope will have a positive impact on the developer onboarding and orientation experience and open new avenues for contribution to the education roadmap.
Some recent quotes from among the team:
I started reaching out for help and allowing myself to think bigger.
Feeling a strong urge to create something valuable here.
Now is the time to lean in together as a team like never before.
Results
Team
- New budget for 2022 approved with input from NF executive leadership
- New recruitment initiatives launched with internal alignment secured
- Finalized 20+ prospective strategic initiatives for 2022
- New hire for [new project 1] starts Monday, with more hires and data sources to come
Funnel
- closed two partnerships bringing in 20 NCI, 50 universities, and 100 campus ambassadors in Japan + 50k thin engagement users/learners in India via YouTube videos
- Shortlisted two digital marketing agencies and discussed the scope of work, proposal awaited from them as next step
Software
- near.academy
- Explored code for the next phase of development
- Created several screens for redesign
- stats.gallery
- Fixed CSS issues
- Managed contributions and new contributors
- maintenance, updates, improvements
- near-in-minutes
- Developed and changed the UX of NimDAO
- Worked on converting from/to different units in the application and used various libraries like near-units. Also worked on displaying Timestamps into human-readable dates using date-fns
- [new project 1]
- Worked on database design
Content
- An overview document for the NEAR Ambassadors program
- Recorded a video introducing stats.gallery and posted Sept update on forum
- Added more notes and solutions to [new project 2] and recorded few videos
- Concept note on NEAR Fellowship (EiR & DiR) program
Challenges & Blockers
- Not a very comfortable working environment causes short-term productivity to decrease
- Active thinking process generates a certain amount of stress
- Put a hold on announcements until the product is live for a month or so
- Difficulty prioritizing issues since this system design is so massive
- Keep pushing off important tasks even though it doesn’t have to be perfect
- Moved into a new apartment
- Dealing with unhelpful contributors/contributions
- Externalities and surprises affecting our critical path
- Sometimes making simple decisions and working on design choices becomes challenging.
- Stuttering while video recording
- Weekly planning still not working at an optimal level
Action items
Team
- 2021.Q4 team alignment and three months planning
- Start hiring process for critical roles
Funnel
- Define timelines for early investments
- Launch partner program support
- Bring the last few remaining partnerships leads to a logical end
- Complete partner onboarding for already funded partners
- Get proposal submitted from digital marketing agencies
Software
- Finish near.academy redesign
- Implement new ideas in near.university prototypes and discuss them
- Break down the issue for [new project 1] into smaller bites
- Porting stats.gallery to Vuex and removing the timeframe & network selectors. This task involves a lot of improvements & modifications to the existing server-side API
- Integrate contributions from new contributors to stats.gallery
- New bug reports on stats.gallery need attention
- Until now working with near-cli to develop NimDAO, planning also to use sputnikdao-cli for other tasks
- Ship NimDAO
Content
- Record a Loom for [new project 1]
- Video recordings for contracts
- Near Campus Ambassador program design