Original Medium Blog Post
Silicon Craftsmen and women, the mighty creative warriors of the Product and Design lands, eat their own dog food (we follow the practices we advocate for).
Every initiative we take is an experiment, based on a set of assumptions and one or more hypotheses that we try to validate.
Below is our progress so far, along with some insights on what we’ve learned and a restructured roadmap that we believe will get us closer to achieving our goals of building better products that will onboard the masses to Web 3.0
Progress June-Mid July
Over the last 6 weeks we have seen the following growth:
- Twitter Followers: 145
- Youtube Subscribers: 11
- Telegram Channel: 28
- Community Hub: 41
We’ve also had multiple 1–1 introductory calls with members of the Near Core team and other projects building on Near, including assisting projects such as Metapool and Ref Finance in their tokenomics and governance design.
Challenge
Silicon Craftsmen is a Product of Products. We operate at the intersection of many, many rapidly evolving pieces in the ecosystem.
Creating a fixed roadmap with pre-determined deliverables runs the risk of being too rigid and failing to adapt and respond as fast as required to serve our community.
On the other hand, it is necessary to have clear guiding principles and priorities to attract new members, enabling them to identify areas of opportunity and to take proactive action.
We can’t tell what the products, projects or trends that would provide the most benefit to the ecosystem will be in three months, but we can build an agile infrastructure to tackle anything.
Guiding Principles
The Silicon Craftsment Roadmap consists of three core Guiding Principles, which embody our mission, values and priorities. Within these Guiding Principles or Operations Pillars, there are actionable items or series of items.
This structure has been designed to allow for rapid experimentation and rapid iteration.
All activities of the Silicon Craftsmen Guild will be measured against the Guiding Principles periodically to ensure that our objectives are being met and to reallocate resources where needed.
1. Introduction to NEARverse
The first Guiding Principle is focused on the growth of the ecosystem. The key areas of focus to achieve growth are:
- Onboarding of new community members
- Attracting new community members (Users, Builders — ambitious founders with ideas, and Developers)
Core Activities and Collaboration
- Product Demos and Tutorials (Enhanced)
- Increased Collaboration with Ecosystem
2. Introduction to Product Thinking
The second Guiding Principle is focused on bringing the best Product Design practices and talent into the Near Ecosystem.
The focus of this pillar is around bridging the gap between ‘mainstream’ Product People and the Crypto World.
Core Activities and Desired Outcomes
- Wild User Interviews (WUI) Podcast — Launching end July 2021
- Introduction to Web 3.0 Workshop / Series — Q3
- Introduction to Product Thinking / Web 3.0 Design Workshop / Series — Q3
- Ideation Workshops leading up to Hackathons
- Start and foster Web 3.0 Product Design conversations
Building Better Products
The final Guiding Principle is all about taking action.
In July we enrolled in the Design Sprint Workshop by AJ & Smart, a leading innovation consultancy based out of Berlin. We are constantly equipping ourselves with new tools and are looking forward to extending these to the Near ecosystem.
We have deliberately structured the Guiding Principles in a way that they complement each other in ways that create a virtuous cycle of growth: as we grow the ecosystem (new talent, new ideas), and we have the theoretical frameworks for improving products, now we want to put it all together and apply to real products.
Core Activities
- Product & UX Design Workshops — Q3
- We will be releasing a form for expressions of interest.
- Case studies from the workshops we run — Q3
