Thanks for your thoughts, and for bringing the language of risk to the DAO. I’ll try to answer with the same language, but I’m curious as to why you believe that this changes the strategic direction of the DAO? From my perspective, project management is a skill like development, design, etc. Creating a guild for this skill like any other fits snugly into the current strategic direction, doesn’t it?
Second, it feels like your questions are saying that it’s less risky to stick with the status quo than to invest in a PM Guild (correct me if I’m wrong). I actually feel founding a PM Guild would REDUCE RISK by allowing projects to make better use of their resources. I come from the world of startups, where the “do nothing” approach is typically more risky than moving forward, so perhaps I’m missing something here? Do the boards you’re sitting on have an established revenue model, or are they “pre-PMF” like BanklessDAO?
The change from the status quo is to create a talent pool and education center around project management. Over the last 3 seasons, projects have been created in pursuit of BanklessDAO’s mission: to help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture. During this time, it’s been identified that there have been issues with project management. In fact this issue has come up multiple times, to the point where the Season 4 spec has heavy language indicating the need for project accountability.
This lack of project management expertise has been confirmed by the PM group, both through project “ride-alongs” in S2, and a comprehensive retrospective process for the DAO’s top 8 projects (by funding amount) in S3.
Put simply: by creating a talent pool and education center around project management, we hope to allow projects to make better use of their resources through providing project management talent for those who need it, and educating our DAOmates in project management best practices.
We haven’t identified external threats, but for internal weaknesses:
- The DAO has a limited runway, and burn rate is higher than spend. This means we need to make effective use of our resources
- Most projects don’t have ANYONE in charge of project management, and consequently cannot share how they are faring from an executional standpoint. This is seen every seasonal funding cycle, when project coordinators and the grants committee have mutual stress in submitting and approving funding requests
- Asynchonous project tooling and process has come up as a cross-project weakness of the DAO during retrospectives, and is something that falls squarely in the realm of project management.
- Projects who search for PMs have difficulty finding one. PMs who introduce themselves in Discord often leave silently. There’s no “place” for PMs at BanklessDAO, and consequently nowhere to turn when their talents are needed.
Creating more availability of project management reduces the risk of the treasury running out of BANK before we can figure out how to make our revenue > burn by helping us make more effective and transparent use of our resources.
The risk to the DAO is wasting 220,000 BANK with no appreciable difference in project effectiveness. This amount would make us the guild with the smallest funding request, according to the S3 spec.
The likelihood of this risk is small. The PM Group has already spent S2-S3 making positive impact through interaction with the DAO. The feedback on our retrospective effort yielded literally 0 negative feedback scores (graph is above), and 10 projects have signalled they’d like to use our retrospective service in S4.
We can’t - but TBH this feels like an unfair question given that BanklessDAO is less than a year old. Difficult for us to project a few years into the future when so much is unknown.
This question is a good example of a question that makes sense for a company that has established product-market fit, but in a pre-product org like BanklessDAO, are these really the best questions to ask?
To be clear, this guild is not about create “dedicated project managers” (i.e. 40-hrs a week specialist) just as design guild’s purpose isn’t to create “dedicated designers”. We simply feel that there is a gap in project management education and talent that could be filled to help all projects. Perhaps that means “hiring” a project manager for 5hrs/wk. Perhaps that means that project coordinators can have access to educational material to help them manage their own projects.
Also important to reiterate that we’re asking for 3 roles at 3hrs/wk…much less than most other guild coordinators (capital efficiency FTW!)
Good catch, and I wanted to address this. We’re creating an output of the retrospective process now that will highlight the issues stated. We’ve also the previous posts I linked to above on why the PM group was founded and how PM issues are apparent during the seasonal funding process.
First of all, the PM group has no authority over the grants process, so it definitely doesn’t make sense for us to try to fix this process. If the grants process needs to be fixed, one would expect the Grants Committee or treasury multisig to be responsible for this.
Your proposal takes into account some education, but not talent retention and growth. If there’s no PM Guild, there’s no place for new PM talent to go. There’s no place for projects looking for PMs to look. There’s no node which can help us get better at PM as a DAO consistently, over the long term. A process or course can be out-of-date the moment it is released - a living body of contributors is much more resilient.
In fact education will be one of our main priorities as a guild, and we’ve already started creating educational material. Talent is one of our other pillars, as evidenced in our role ask.
I’ll bring up another reason why I prefer founding a guild rather than try to gain consensus for individual efforts - it’s just less fun for me. For many people, project management is boring, and so gaining consensus is an uphill battle. As a guild, we are empowered to continually make improvements. As a loose collection of individuals chasing proposal after proposal, we aren’t really empowered at all.
The PM group didn’t ask for upfront funding - we provided value and then asked for funding. We created a method of value generation within the DAO that has proven useful to the projects that use it. We’ve always wanted to help sow the seeds of project management and accountability by holding ourselves accountable as much as possible. We’ve spent 2 seasons making sustained, consistent progress through providing value for others. If you can’t trust us with this modest ask then I wonder what WOULD it take for you to agree that opening a new cost center would be worth it?