IPFS Documentation & Developer UX WG: Q4 2019 Retrospective

Instructions

Please add your notes async to this document. The core team will also discuss in a sync meeting 17 December at 1600 UTC.

If you'd like to attach your name to a comment for further discussion, please do so in brackets afterwards, like this [Jessica]
If someone already added your note, please copy-paste a plus-one emoji at the end, like this 1️⃣

We did extremely well overall, despite the IPFS hosting discussion and resulting decisions taking longer and ending up differently than we'd hoped
Postponed items were ones we'd included as super-stretch goals anyway, so no regrets there
Would have been a nice chronological milestone to ship on IPFS by end of year, but not worth asking for heroics, particularly over the holidays

We could have done a better job of anticipating hosting controversy, and potentially its likely outcome; did it make sense to try to "win" that debate? 1️⃣
We didn't always realize when it would be helpful to bring in long-term labbers from elsewhere in the org to lend history, experience and even clout to difficult discussions (see below)
Some management trickle-down led to really poor morale among everyone :(
OKR ambitions vs real available time given lab week, holidays and other asks across the org.
- Keep in mind that working async requires a HUGE documentation/notetaking overhead … maybe we just assume an extra 30% work!

Keep focusing on setting realistic, achievable goals, particularly in light of potential team makeup changes
Encourage/pressure higher-ups to make big decisions (hosting on IPFS for example), in cases where we're not allowed to make them ourselves.
- Not just higher-ups. People on adjacent teams also have more power/respect/influence than we do, and let's remember to work with, consult and leverage them
Establish more visceral connections to users … except we don't have the people to support this … it can't be done in someone's "extra" time :(
- But we can still try to keep this in mind as we go
- And hopefully as we hire a community person, we can get more involved with their work
More focus on content creation (+ integrating visuals in it) - both docs and ProtoSchool
Use shipped@ to publicize our work
Explicitly connect our persona work to site development

Ability to get quick feedback from those in power (this wasn't always possible due to war mode and similar)
Understanding our limitations/powers as a team without having express permission from management
Our own budget for one-off tasks (freelance writing, dev tasks, etc etc)