Team Proposal: leekuanjew

[Larry_Cucumber]

Intro

Many of you know @leekuanjew (LKJ) to be an integral part of the Pickle Finance community. He spearheaded the Smart Treasury discussion and has actively participated in Pickle governance and product roadmap development.

LKJ has professional experience working as a growth hacker/product marketing manager and also has full stack development/UX design skills. LKJ has expressed interest in helping guide the product direction of this project going forward.

Proposal

I think that LKJ would be an asset to the Pickle Finance team. The team is still currently a bit thin, with 0xkoffee mangaging the development side of things and myself handling the business/strategy. A gap in UX/product/marketing remains, which LKJ would fill nicely.

I’m not sure what sort of capacity the community feels is appropriate for LKJ (e.g. full-time, freelance, other). But we have a healthy treasury and I think the best way to use it is to use it to invest in the growth of Pickle (which includes expanding on its core resources/competencies).

As this is still fairly open ended, I would appreciate input from the community and @leekuanjew himself as to what direction we should go in and what a suitable budget might be.

[leekuanjew]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, @Larry_Cucumber! Personally, I am (as @chimaera likes to say) willing and able to go all the way and put myself at the service of the project and the community. I reckon investing in growth is the right approach for Pickle at this point, as there’s been proof of product-market fit, we need to work on our acquisition, activation, and retention on an ongoing basis. We have a loyal and strong community that wants to contribute, as they’ve shown in times of progress as well as hardship. Basically …

As far as a suitable budget, I think at the moment the scope would be my role rather than a budget for compensation of the many community members who deserve or require it to commit time in development, community-building, and evangelism (i.e. memelords). I think for any role, good market-based compensation is a proper starting point based on the demands of the role. For this role of leading the growth efforts in a protocol of Pickle’s profile, at its current juncture, I am suggesting $2,000/week which works out to the $104k/year mark. I think splitting that between stables-Pickle say 2:1 would align incentives with the community as well as vesting. Think of muh family …

These funds will go to:

• Developing and managing a Growth process: an iterative, data-driven approach to reach the organization’s goals by experimenting and compounding on what works, open to the whole community to participate in. This also involves goal-setting that is product-oriented and informs the product roadmap: its strategic, technical, and UX components.
• Managing design, engineering, and marketing resources that are specifically focused on engaging the community of users. These resources are deployed in tasks ranging from optimization of a certain aspect in the Growth funnel (e.g. search engine optimization for awareness) or delivering user-facing collateral like website pages, or content in a publishing platform, or engagement in social media platforms.
• Conducting research into the usability, accessibility, and scalability of the product as a whole, through direct interaction with its users.
• Contributing to the management of the communications, partnerships, and community of the protocol.
• Contributing to the development and management of the documentation of the protocol, its governance process, and its brand identity.

As you can probably guess, eventually this will take more than one man in the great landmass of Asia, which is why it is important to get set up with the process so we can start articulating what we aim to do in each sprint before the community can get involved in a meaningful way.

[Mah_Dills]

LKJ you have my absolute support. Your voluntary contributions, as a community member, have been significant. I look forward to you joining the core team at PICKLE, on a full-time / committed basis. I also love that we are growing the core team from active community members. If we consider ourselves a DAO, what better way to do so, than to grow our core team from within our community.

Our timing is critical and our potential is great.

[Jomari]

What are the metrics by which we can evaluate his work? If we can apply metrics to the objectives, that can provide a roadmap for Leekuanjeew and additional role expansions.

Descriptions are nice, #s are better. I am comfortable with the salary aspect.

[sevenz]

@Jomari

Descriptions are nice, #s are better. I am comfortable with the salary aspect.

+1

Would love to see numbers too.

[leekuanjew]

@Jomari @sevenz good call. Numbers are normally for the “hiring lead / committee” (in this case @Larry_Cucumber + others members) to set. From my experience, the business/strategy lead sets revenue/profit numbers, and negotiates with the product/growth/marketing leads for translating that into metrics that the whole organisation can understand. This is usually a main metric (i.e. a North Star metric) that approximates revenue but is also a health indicator for the organisation. For example, if Pickle’s main revenue is a lagging indicator (performance fees come much after all the growth effort has been done) then an indicator closer to the effort (like TVL) is used as a proxy for eventual revenue and becomes the NSM. From there, some performance objective is drawn, like achieving a certain growth percentage for the quarter. Then, that objective is broken down further into key results, the indicators are selected to track those results, and the indicators are then reported on regularly to track the progress being made towards reaching the objective in question. So you end up with KPIs => OKRs.

Since this proposal basically creates the department, this numbers may not (yet) have been defined to that degree of specificity. Still, the hiring committee will focus on getting positive ROI from the hire with rough numbers.

[Jomari]

So @leekuanjew i know they would normally set the numbers. But this is a unique situation.

What metrics would you like to be held to or against from your perspective of where the protocol is?

This is definitely more of a write your own job description kind of thing. I just wanted to have some way to quantify your work.

[leekuanjew]

Noted. There shall be a process, of which I am only a candidate who is giving his input here. I understand the difficulty of quantifying this type of work yet the desire to do so, and while I think it is very reasonable to have some deliverables for, say, the first 3 months, at the end of the day you will want to mostly quantify the results and have the person filling this role be beholden to that. Say, for example, the growth in TVL. I am sure that ideal deliverables and KPIs will be sorted out by the hiring committee before the interviewing process is carried out.

[akirillo]

Thank you for enumerating in some detail where you expect your efforts to fall. As I read the list, though, there didn’t seem to be much emphasis on new product offerings / feature development (ig this is addressed by the first point of managing a growth process).

I’m interested in how you prioritize these responsibilities. How much of your time do you plan to spend on new feature development & roadmapping vs. product maintenance (which is a bit of a reductionist way to say everything else, ig)?

[leekuanjew]

That’s a great question. You are right in that the growth process informs the specifications and requirements of new features as well as enhancements. Basically, I expect to spend around 80% of my time on the first two list items in the description above (growth process and managing resources for engagement), and around half of the remaining 20% on the third list item (UX research). Since at the beginning, we will be a small team, we shall all be participating in the growth process. Once a week (assuming weekly sprints), during Sprint planning, we will re-score all items in the Growth project and assess the results of any concluded experiments. Since this is an experimental approach, whenever possible, before committing resources to feature development, we shall have an experimental or limited release as part of our Growth experiments. When a concluded experiment indicates major impact for a full feature, we can add the specs for the feature request to the roadmap, where it will be tackled based on the availability of resources. In ideal circumstances, the implementation of the roadmap itself comes from the CTO / Engineering lead but since we will be a small team, we shall be sharing engineering resources between Growth experiments and feature development and thus we will likely end up prioritising features (since we will have some more solid insights as to their impact). Taking Scrum as a guide, around 10% of the overall time spent on development is taken up by aligning on roadmapping, plus the time it takes the PM to write the specs.

[akirillo]

Gotcha, this seems very reasonable to me. It was a bit hard to tell what the relative priorities of those responsibilities u listed were at first but this helps clear things up. Also cool to get this lil glimpse into ur process