Airdrop Retrospective
Introduction
We at Sifchain have been hard at work delivering new programs, features, enhancements and upgrades. While moving quickly and efficiently is of utmost importance to us, we understand the need for reflection. Reflection allows us to learn from our past successes, and even more importantly, our past missteps. We are very proud of the work that we have done up to this point, and we are fully aware that we have many areas that we can, and will, grow in.
We want to introduce a series that we will be doing around our retrospectives. The community is extremely important to us and in our desire for transparency, we believe that it is important to be open and honest with you all with our previous successes, failures, and what we are doing to ensure we learn from our past.
At Sifchain, we operate on an agile-centric 2-week sprint cadence. Within our development-to-deployment process, we hold retrospectives where the team comes together to discuss things that went well, things that didn’t go well, and things we will be doing to ensure we are constantly improving. This series is meant to be a window into our previous retrospectives that we have held to give the community insight into these various areas. With this series, we are also opening the door to additional comments and feedback from the community.
So please feel free to comment on anything you agree with, disagree with, or things that you think are missing that can help us grow as a team and as a community.
Retrospective Format
Just to provide a quick blurb on how we run our retrospectives so this series makes sense in how we format these articles, we follow the ‘stop, start, continue’ format. We take the first 10ish minutes of the retro and allow everyone to add any and all of their comments to the document. After this time, the PM running the retro will go through each item, 1 by 1, and allow for an open dialogue to ensue. After each item is discussed, it may result in a direct action item/takeaway/deliverable that we highlight and assign out to ensure there is accountability.
Airdrop Program
Brief Introduction:
The token airdrop program was an initiative of ours that had a few different main goals: 1) To get people excited about Sifchain and to spread the word about Sifchain to their community. 2) To get people ROWAN, with the hope that they would use that ROWAN within the DEX (to pool, stake, swap, etc), and to get them into the Sifchain ecosystem as potential long-term users.
Key Takeaways from this program:
More thorough in-depth requirement gathering and spec’ing early on, before we communicate anything out to the community.
- This initiative had a few gaps from our internal process perspective. We severely over-simplified the technical steps that would need to happen to pull off the program as originally communicated out to the community. Not only did we over simplify it, but once we got into it, we realized that the resources we needed to do all of the development and testing were already spread too thin on other projects and initiatives. This caused us to make some hard decisions and to delay on our previously estimated timelines.
Ensuring our program is 100% aligned with the goals we are trying to accomplish with it.
- Another area we will improve on is making sure that our programs are completely aligned with the goals we are trying to accomplish. Once we launched the program, we received a lot of feedback from the community on our intentions. After further discussions internally, and across groups within Sifchain, we realized some minor, but powerful, adjustments we could have made to the program. Again, this is something we hope to avoid in the future with more in-depth documentation and getting involvement from not only additional internal groups, but from the community as well.
External communication to the community needs to be more specific and detailed.
- We were excited about communicating out progress of the program to our community. But due to our excitement, we communicated out certain things inaccurately (for example: the estimation on the time of delivery). We are ensuring we put a heavy focus on our external communications to ensure they are detailed, accurate, and transparent.
Better explanation of rules & eligibility of our programs.
- Once we launched the program, we received A LOT of questions. Ones that should have been clearly articulated in external documentation on our docs site. The program was really only explained in a Medium article and it did not go into enough detail to answer all of the questions participants had. We are making an effort now to explain programs, features, and enhancements on our Sifchain Docs site in greater detail for clear understanding.
More community involvement.
- Our community is great and has a lot of awesome ideas. We learned that we should’ve gotten our community’s input on the program before we officially launched it. This is going to be something we do in the future to ensure the things we do are in alignment of our community’s wants and desires.
Clearly documenting testing requirements early on.
- An area that happened to be an afterthought for us was around how we were going to test every piece of this program to ensure its full accuracy. Because we didn’t do this up front, we ended up spending more time than desired figuring out how to fully test everything inside and out.
Closing Statements
The airdrop program taught us some valuable lessons. It helped us uncover critical changes we need to make to our internal processes. It also shined a light on areas we were ignoring in terms of how we communicate and engage with our external community. These lessons have been turned into actionable items by our team, and we hope that the community will begin to recognize improvements as we move forward.
As this is our first post in this series, we hope to receive your feedback and comments on anything said above! You can share here https://sifchainpublic.ideas.aha.io/
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