Context
(PS: I had a much longer post that got lost into the Github ether. I’ll upload that additional context here later in the week. This is a brief summary in the meantime.)
We’ve been pushing.
As a team, we’ve landed on the values of radical collaboration, argue in code, and individual progress towards team intentionality.
These values have helped us push through a QUARTER of our first year of experiments. We’ve learned about how we build best together and some areas of improvement.
At their core, experiments started from a desire to FAFO - to (for lack of a better work) f*ck around and find out. We started them to do their namesake - to try things. Experiments allows us to go deep (dive far into a topic) and then back up and explore.
This ties directly into our North Star: build the best native interaction platform for blockchains. And while Dub’s first iteration of this is a browser, we’re focused on building the most flexible blockchain interaction engine.
Dubteration
We’ve had strong decision making as a team - quickly moving forward on momentary and sporadic product choices that offer long-term flexibility. But, this strategy is starting to struggle.
With software development, it’s easy to explore, make quick decisions, move forward, and move back. All progress is recorded, reversible, and forkable.
But as we’ve started focusing more energy on design, we’ve found the more fluid experimentation process and parallel workflow has made it easy for the team to cop out on decisions in favor of pursuing several paths. As a result, it’s been impossible to keep track of past progress and make decisions.
Next Steps
The primary ‘fix’ I would like to propose is re-orienting our Figma file structure - orienting files around experiments, dates, and then topics rather than simply a name. While this makes files easier to find, it more importantly adds a level of version management to track past progress. Each file should have a visual title card with its index and contents.
Secondarily, I wanted to propose re-orienting design standups around decision making, stacking as follows (starting from Thursday since experiments launch Wed)
Thursday / Friday - deep exploration on a single design thread Monday - design critique for single thread Wednesday - design critique for wide exploration (during retro on Friday) - decision on a single design / interaction modality to pursue in code
By going deep then wide, I’m hoping we can achieve some interesting interactions knowing the intricacies of a single design. The most important idea is to continue to give us time to explore but re-orient our week to keep us pushing.
More on this post coming soon (as soon as I’m able to recover my write up!)
See y’all soon, and more next week 👋