Guild Name: NEAR Product Shapers Guild
Guild Leader: @mayur
Guild DAO: coming soon
Links: nearproduct.org | Discord
Mission and Vision
The NEAR ecosystem is booming. New projects are showing up every day and more internal-facing services are starting to appear in the ecosystem to help teams like Marketing, Design, Development and more.
Despite a healthy ecosystem, one of the issues projects frequently face in building their idea is “shaping” it into something more concrete so that Development and Design teams can quickly get up to speed and execute. The better “shaped” a project, the faster products can get to market and succeed.
The second issue is scarce resources. At the moment, development teams are spending excessive time with stakeholders to understand and build their roadmap, product hypothesis and so on. Development teams don’t want to take this responsibility on and would prefer to focus on their core skills: engineering. In traditional software organizations, Product Managers, working with stakeholders and Designers, own this area of work.
NEAR Product Shapers Guild has been built to provide PSAAS (Product-shaping-as-a-service) and PMAAS (Product-Management-as-a-service). For example:
- Product Shaping (one-pagers, story writing, product strategy, ecosystem launch assistance)
- Product Research services (user research, market research)
- Product Design services (wireframes, low-fi and high-fi mockups, customer research, surveys and more)
- Product Management services (ongoing roadmap and feature development and prioritization)
- Ecosystem guidance to help stakeholders navigate the NEAR ecosystem to launch their project or product by partnering with Development teams like INC4 and others
Who is the guild intended for?
The guild is for
- Stakeholders that want to develop and bring a new project to the NEAR ecosystem but haven’t shaped it well enough yet for developers or designers to get involved
- Development teams that want stakeholders to “shape” their product or project in more detail
- Already launched projects that need help navigating their backlog or feature pipeline
The value that NEAR Product Shapers Guild delivers
At present, when a stakeholder has “an idea” that could help the NEAR ecosystem, there are many steps they have to take to achieve success. “Time to market” can be significantly reduced by helping stakeholders with “product management and shaping services”. This doesn’t just reduce “time to market”. It also increases project success by helping stakeholders with “product market” fit.
What is fractional.pm?
A little back story. I’m a 25+ year veteran of the tech industry and have worked next to Engineering and startups my entire career - including as a Product Manager. In early 2020, I started fractional.pm - hoping to match new and aspiring PMs with startups. I posted on FB and the post went viral - I got 200 messages the next morning and built a PM community of 500+ in under a week. The project was abandoned due to COVID but now I see a new possibility with NEAR. As I’m now an Entrepreneur in Residence with NEAR I realize that fractional.pm can help NEAR ecosystem projects achieve greater success by providing product shaping and management services.
Next Steps
I have already had a chat with @Primaveralina from INC4 guild as I was reaching out to Development teams. We had a very productive and positive chat. There seems to be need for this guild to exist to reduce the burden on Development teams. Despite that, I will be surveying the ecosystem and continuing to build relationships with stakeholders to understand their challenges in product building and execution. I will also be meeting with JC later today to discuss guilds and get further guidance.
Are you looking for Designers or Product Managers?
Definitely! Please get in touch with me directly or join the Discord
Can I join this guild?
Definitely! Please get in touch with me directly or join the Discord
How to make contact
Join our Discord, send me a DM here, or leave a comment. My Discord is Mayur#0001 and email is hello@mayur.ca
