Overall, we have made decent progress towards our goals that we collaborated on and put up in June
The Portfolio of Bets -- Product Goals and Tactics July to December 2023 but there are areas that require further attention and improvement.
Here are the slides we prepped for all fox. the key takeaway:
Themes will guide our recommendations to engineering (per quarter).
Trustless and permissionless protocols allow for much more user choice. So, we need to focus on improving user delight, making ShapeShift top of mind for people, even if they can do the same things elsewhere. We need to understand why people choose Shapeshift while also being aware of how people use our app. If you just check stats, the lions share is currently Thorchain use cases.
A more streamlined, less cluttered, speedy, and delightful experience unlocks retention and revenue growth. Additionally we should grow into tightly scoped faster moving experiments, remove things that aren’t working quicker, not add without thinking through the maintenance, and ABOVE ALL ELSE increase communication and engagement with our users. For extra credit if we have bandwith, we should continue to pursue partnerships with teams that want to work with us, have low integration lift, and apply to grants if they support our growth and sustainability.
Over the 7 months I’ve had the pleasure of serving in this role i’m proud of the cross workstream alignment and excited to see a new era in the DAO begin. I figured a few posts would be good so we can refresh the focus for the DAO’s product offering(s).
Overall Progress
- Clearly this is the first time product has looked back to ask “how well did we build?”
- Harsh scaling on tactical performance puts us at 65% total progress towards our goals.
- I went back through the goals and tactics and graded each with the following scale
is failed (0) 
is in progress (1) 
is done to satisfaction (2) 
is super nut ( 2.5). You can see these in the notion with purple text takeaways. If you have a better scoring algo lemme know!
Goal 1: Execute on Calculated Portfolio of Bets
- This goal has reached 66% completion.
- All necessary DAO resources are following a spec. The coordination sheet moved from a laundry list into a focused set of well specced features, and frameworks have improved. Though they can be better documented and more clearly disseminated.
- Velocity of feature development needs improvement. Momentum is the cure.
Goal 2: Retention & Revenue Growth
- This goal has reached 40% completion.
- Retention is still not close to sticky or early signs of product-market fit. However, there are glimmers of rising volume and October gave us the first month of organic unsubsidized demand to benchmark towards.
- Plus we are seeing upwards trajectories on volume, more diverse wallets connections, and larger balances even though ledger is less that a week old.
check the goals mixpanel board - Revenue modeling has been integrated into spec documents. As has technical due diligence, common gotchas, and success/failure criteria.
- Revenue goals have been met multiple times (15k per month was the northstar) , but WAT’s and retention are still failing.
Goal 3: Mandated Metrics & Measurement
- This goal has hit 80% success
- im being harsh here only because we didn’t complete a use case map
- Data reports are frictionless and last 10 minutes during product office hours. We even have a notionpage for them with embedded charts.
- Specs have revenue projections and success metrics included.
Goal 4: Experiment More
- This goal has achieved 53% completion.
- The “frontend as public good” hypothesis needs further evaluation, messaging, and revision. When applicable, donations had mixed success, and missions were a dud.
- Various experiments have been conducted with varying results. As we move into more focus we will conduct another revenue experiment with tightly bound acceptance criteria and tracking.
Goal 5: Talk to Our Users
- This goal has achieved 53% completion.
- Canny has been implemented, but user feedback cadence needs improvement.
- Conversations with users via Tims and product calendar need more transparency and more newbies in the pipeline.
Goal 6: Assist Grants Partnerships
- This goal achieved 100% success
- Grants have been obtained, providing USDC to help the treasury. We learned that the lead time to convert these is about 3 months to a full year. Substantial grants === substantial time and the mighty @TWells has moved on to other gigs. We’ll stay vigilent on opportunities that might be achievable.
Portfolio of regrets??
Can’t have bets without regrets. ~~ I dunno…. Proust or something.
Product, ops, marketing, and ENG came together on Wednesday with the stated agenda of rethinking app architecture by understanding maintenance burdens and thinking about what to do with exchange API. The artifact can be found here. What we ended up getting into was a deeper discussion about which things in the app are not getting usage, lacked a business case, or weren’t getting traction. As a result:
Goodbye API we hardly knew ye
In the spirit of owning our fails, I’m sad to report that the exchange API will have to sunset for now. With documented code patterns and learnings archived of course; this way if we can pick up code patterns and abstractions for trying again…we’ll be ready. Im immensely proud of the work that MKBD especially @hpayne_shapeshiftdem and @csjoanna put into converting 100 cold people in a spreadsheet into active conversations. I’m confident that the market timing was the biggest blocker and an undifferentiated offering at full feature parity did not help.
I mean, just, look at this competition from 1inch:
(this is a real marketing page, my god what am i doing here) 
On the frontend side of things, granular feature by feature breakdown, you can see the release notes from Tyler and I coming soon ™️ One step in better & more transparent process for the DAO.
Next Post: Projected Quarterly Themes, process sharing/updating, and moving forward.
I’ll be posting more again about product goals/roadmap soon, but for now you can think of roadmap priorities with the following tagline: “ShapeShift: THOR plus More.”
It seems the best fit for our immediate future.
Onwards!
