Introducing marketing team weekly progress reports

Welcome to 2022! A key takeaway from 2021 is that we have room for improvement on the marketing team when it comes to transparency.

In an effort to improve transparency and work toward decentralizing the DAO, the marketing team will operate differently this year.

Each week, every grant recipient on the marketing team will post a progress report to share with the DAO what was accomplished and any notable updates related to their work for API3.

In the past we’ve done this internally between core team members and it has helped us collaborate and coordinate with one another. Now that the authoritative DAO has had time to mature and as we work toward increased decentralization and autonomy, we need to take it to the next level. Being more transparent on a weekly basis will help achieve this.

We have a new #progress-reports category on the forum for these reports. Each report should be posted as a new topic in this category. They should be tagged to identify the team (e.g. marketing-team) as well as the grant recipient (e.g. ryan).

I expect this will raise some questions that I’ll try to answer here.

What problem are we solving with weekly progress reports?

Weekly progress reports address several problems.

  • DAO members who are not grant recipients have repeatedly expressed interest in more transparency and community involvement from the core team.
  • Some team members have been more active and productive than others. While I have made team composition changes in response, increased transparency rewards effort and productivity with deserved recognition.
  • As a fully remote, globally distributed team, communication and collaboration is challenging. Weekly reports help ensure that we’re communicating sufficiently.
  • Sometimes we suffer from a tendency hold back from sharing for too long as we try to over-perfect our work which is wasteful. In the spirit of releasing early and often, it’s better if we share what we’ve done more frequently and get feedback.

Why are we doing this on the forum?

In the past we’ve done these weekly updates in private channels. We recently made an effort to share more in the public Discord but there isn’t enough structure and information gets missed or lost. The forum is public, it’s organized (by topics and tags), it has more longevity, and it’s easy to search and navigate.

Why is it only the marketing team?

Because I only lead the marketing team. If other teams decide that having grant recipients do regular, public progress reports is a good idea then they are more than welcome to do the same. By tagging each topic in #progress-reports with the team name (e.g. marketing-team) it’s very easy to filter by team.

How will we handle confidential information?

Each grant recipient will have to use good judgement. If you’re working on something that has confidential aspects then write your report in a way that doesn’t divulge the confidential parts. But be reasonable. In a DAO that builds open source software it’s not reasonable that everything you’re working on is entirely confidential. Share what you can, when you can. For example, don’t share partner names until they’re made public.

Do we still need to post weekly marketing updates in Slack or Discord?

No. This replaces the weekly updates we’ve been posting in other channels. You don’t have to repost this same information in Slack.

When does this start?

Now. Marketing team grant recipients are expected to post a progress report this week. It can be any day that you like. Make your own schedule. But make sure to post a report each week. I will probably do mine either Thursday or Friday but that is not a requirement. It’s more important that you are consistent with your own reports.

The current marketing team grant recipients are @ryan, @KenKarv, @Marcus, @Midhav, @Auvi, @brian, @can @ManuAlzuru, @Typto, @cypherbadger, @TyrKyros, @twellener. Each of us should post a progress report this week. This should be viewed as a positive thing. If you have any questions or concerns, please ask and we’ll work through them.

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Great idea Ryan, goes hand in hand with delegators being transparent with their governance votes. Excited to learn more on a weekly basis the progress of the project. Cheers!

P.S.
Is Slack only used for the core API3 team?

I assume a lot of information is distributed within Slack channels.

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It’s used for non-public discussion. The marketing team used it more in the past (when more was confidential such as the API3 Alliance members before they were announced) but now we use the public Discord more.

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Compliments to @Ryan and the Marketing team, I have never seen this level of reporting.

@ryan, is it ok if I send you a DM.

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It’s been a month since we started weekly progress reports. First, thank you to the marketing team for jumping in and trying something new. It’s not always easy putting yourself out there and sharing your accomplishments. Second, I’d like to answer some questions and address concerns that have come up during the first month.

What should go in my weekly progress report?

Your weekly report should focus on the outcomes that you have achieved each week. The DAO doesn’t care much about exactly how you spent your time. It cares about what you have accomplished. Be specific. Include links when possible to make it easy for the reader.

It’s often useful to share status on a work in progress. You don’t have to wait until something is completely done to mention it. But your report should contain items that communicate meaningful progress toward a useful outcome and not just say you did some repetitive work or minute tasks.

If you’re having trouble coming up with meaningful progress or useful outcomes that you’ve achieved each week then you should rethink how you’re spending your time. The DAO is paying you a grant and wants to see outcomes that are worth the spend.

But I don’t like being micromanaged!

Neither do I. But this isn’t micromanagement. It’s the opposite. This is you having the freedom to manage your time as you see fit to fulfill the purpose of your role. Rather than being assigned mundane tasks, you get to choose how to do your job. All you have to do is share your results with the DAO each week. Even CEOs are accountable to someone (e.g. the board) and have to show results. It’s not too much to ask of us.

The DAO deserves to see these progress reports. Additionally, they help keep everyone in the loop about what you’re working on and enable efficient coordination in a decentralized organization. It adds a little structure to the chaos.

Rather than thinking of it as a nuisance, I recommend thinking of it as an opportunity to show off how much you’re contributing each week.

Why don’t other teams have to do this?

The tech team effectively does. The results of the tech team’s work are expressed in code and are naturally visible on Github. Marketing doesn’t have that naturally so we need to report our progress manually. This is just transparency for the marketing team.

If you have any other questions or points of view you would like to share, please do! I’m always up for discussion or debate about what’s worth doing. - Ryan

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