Case Study: Roadmapping with Gladius

Gladius approached us with a grand vision: create a world in which everyone’s spare bandwidth is both a moneymaker and an integral part of a global barrier against denial-of-service attacks. To make their vision a reality, they needed a plan. This is the story of how Kyokan’s ‘Groundwork’ roadmapping service delivered that plan.

“Groundwork went above and beyond what we expected.”

— Alex Godwin, Gladius CTO

The Calls

In Gladius’s case, we roadmapped three products: their Web Portal, Node Manager, and Pool Manager. The Groundwork process starts with a series of calls. The goal is to answer the following questions about each product to be built:

• Who is it for?
• What does it do?
• When does the final product need to be delivered?
• How will it be consumed?
• Have any assumptions been made about how it should function or what technology should be used?

And, finally:

• Why should I, as a user, use this product?

It’s also critically important to use this time to understand the intent behind each product decision. We want to ensure not only that the best product is built, but that the right product is built.

“It was very clear that [Kyokan] knew just as much as us about the project, and asked us questions that we didn’t think about. It was a very complete and thorough analysis.”

— Marcelo McAndrew, Gladius COO

The Onsite

Next, Kyokan moves to an onsite meeting with the Client. Jacky Chan, Kyokan co-founder, flew out to Washington D.C. to meet the Gladius team and complete what we call a ‘Design Jam.’ This is where we dig into the nitty-gritty of how the product should function from an end-user and technology standpoint.

We do a lot of whiteboarding and design exercises during this time. Our favorite design exercise is called ‘Crazy 8s.’ We set a timer for 8 minutes, and each member of the group sketches 8 quick design ideas. When the timer pings, each person chooses their top two design ideas. The goal here is to rapidly prototype the product’s UX for later expansion by our design team and to flag any UX requirements that are potentially difficult to implement. We’ve found this to be extremely effective.

“[Crazy 8s] is an extremely useful tool that I didn’t know existed… I think it’s something I’m going to use myself in the future.”

— Alex

We’ll also go over any important technical considerations. For Gladius, this included how we’d integrate the UI with their smart contracts and backend services.

With a tightly focused day, we were able to gather all the information from the Gladius team.

The Production and The Delivery

At this point, we have all the information we need to construct the final Groundwork roadmap. Groundwork is an instruction manual for implementers; with it, our clients can provide the documentation to any competent dev team in order to execute their vision. To deliver this promise, we boil down our meetings into a set of Product and Engineering RFCs. In the spirit of the IETF Requests For Comment that they are named after, our RFCs are formal documents that formally describe the functionality and technical details about the project.

They include:

• User stories.
• User personas.
• Wireframes.
• Flow diagrams.
• Architecture diagrams.
• Coding standards.
• Execution plans outlining which part of the project should be implemented each week.

We do all the heavy-lifting here, including prioritization and blocker resolution. We’ve found that a weekly project plan is high-level enough to give the implementation team leeway to resolve unexpected problems while still being a confident time estimate.

The Bottom Line

Some folks believe that upfront roadmapping is make-work. We, and our customers, have found that Groundwork saves time and reduces risk to an extent that far outweighs the time and monetary cost of the service.

“[Without Groundwork] we may have hired people that we didn’t need. We’d have spent a lot of our time searching for tools and getting organized. Our roadmap prevented significant delays to the project. It’s clear that [Kyokan] put a lot of hours into it, and it was definitely worth it.”

— Alex

Many clients continue on to engage the Kyokan team for the development work described in their roadmap. Gladius was one of them. Together, we’re bringing their big vision to life. Check back here for development updates as the project progresses.

If your project needs something like Groundwork, or any other service we provide, drop us a line.