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title: Starting Questions

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# Starting Questions



We want to look at the following overarching themes 

**Vision**
- What is our overarching vision and mission
    - The Cosmos-SDK is a toolkit to develop state machines in a composable manner. We want to expand out of the basis we live in today, which is blockchains. There is a new world evolving with rollups and potentially more in the future, that we should be poised to participate in. 
    - pushing tendermint into module - working with other consensus engines
    - security, dev x and performance
    - 1-2 year vision
    - Define a product roadmap along side the technical roadmap
        - Product Roadmap:
            - marketing
            - branding
            - product direction outside of technical
            - getting ahead of the curve (not in firefighter mode)
        - technical roadmap
            - get the the tech to represent the product vision

- What is our mission statement and what are we working towards changing in the ecosystem
- Why are we different
    - When we look at the landscape of SDKs and frameworks to build blockchains or rollups we see that they are not actually SDKs but frameworks that try to be SDKs. This means that they impose limitations on the user on what they can do with the framework. We will be a proper SDK in which the application is compsed of various layers, the communication of these layers are defined via interfaces and application developers can compose with what they would like. 
- What do we want to achieve in 6/12 months

**Strategy**
- How will we make our plan a reality 
- What are our steps 

**What is required of us as the SDK?**
- What is the feedback on the product
    - the feedback goes through many cycles. The way I see the sdk is in two levels, the first is a lot of base things that 95% of users wont see till the very end of a refactor and the other level being modules, things that are front and center. For the core things, its easy to understand what are wants/needs, at the module level there is a need for a feedback loop with more users
- What are our requirements for us to be successful 
    - Being successful, can mean different things to different people for the sdk. We want to stay relevant, we want users, we want 3k TPS. For me, the most important thing is staying relevent in a world where things are moving faster than we can keep up and still have lots of tech debt. 

**Metrics**
- How are we measuring our success 
    - The success to use would be in maintainability of the project. We want longevity so how do we get there. The other side could be new users and decreasing time to launch. 

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**Questions for roadmap**
1.  What are the main goals and objectives of the Cosmos SDK?
    - We want the sdk to be a simple platform for users to build applications with, not only blockchains but could be rollups as well. 
3.  Who are the target users of the Cosmos SDK?
    - Target users are developers that want to use a distributed data base to secure something. The current landscape is launch a chain, get a validator set, etc. We have become entranched in that vising that we forgot there is more out there, expanding outwards would be good. 
5.  What are the most important features or functionality that need to be included in the Cosmos SDK?
6.  What are the current limitations or pain points of the Cosmos SDK that need to be addressed?
    - very verbose, written in go, not a clear standarnd for testing. These are items that come to mind for me

8.  What are the main trends and advancements in the blockchain and crypto space that need to be considered when developing the Cosmos SDK? And how are these measured?
9.  What are the major competitors of the Cosmos SDK and how does the Cosmos SDK differentiate itself from them?
    - substrate is the biggest, there isnt much of a difference other than some tooling and community 

11.  What are the main technical challenges that need to be overcome in order to successfully develop and implement the Cosmos SDK?
        - modularization of differnent layers and decoupling them. this will allow items to evolve on their own without needing a larger sdk release
    
13.  What resources (people, funding, etc.) will be needed in order to successfully develop and implement the Cosmos SDK other than the ICF?
        - This is a hard one, and could use a strategy session on its own. It may not be known till after this quarter what it would take 
15.  What is the expected timeline for the development and release of the Cosmos SDK? - can we develop a rough release strategy 
        - Core sdk should be every 5 months, 4 months of development and 1 month of audits and testing. Modules and things spun out of core sdk will have their own release timeline but that is harder to time, its basically if we refactor x, then do an audit and testing and release, no need to wait. 
17.  How will the Cosmos SDK be tested and validated before being released to the public?
        - In the future, we will have continous audits where the changes will be audited and we will have a suite of tests that will cover most cases we would like to cover. This will make the cycles of releasing faster, because it wont be like now. The main issue is coordination with other teams.   

**General Questions for Sprints**
- How can we translate above into our sprints?
- How will 4 week sprints help? - I think this will help increase motivation and accountability
    - Previosuly we didnt have a good retro plan for 2 weeks, the board became more fluid and so making it be monthly allows the team to do monthly retros and hopefully can keep the team more accountable. 
- Do we want to have grooming sessions or retros
    - monthly retros post sprint are good, groming sessions not sure yet

**Team vision** 
- What do we want our team to look like and how is the above strategy determined by the team
- e.g are we a strong engineering team, self starters, product focused, how will this determine our next hires and what else is missing from the team 
    - Identifiying our needs before we hire is good, this is going to happen best after q1 when we know who from regen we are taking on. 

**Marketing**
- How does the marketing plan flow from the above vision?
    - I think we need a marketing plan in order to better execute. Currently we are riding the coat tails of cosmos but this isnt that easy anymore. 
- How do we measure success, through the amount of chains using the sdk, how much traction we have on twitter?

**To do**:
1.  Answer questions above
2.  Create mission statement
3. Check to see if anything is missing from the current roadmap and if there are missing dates on specific pieces of work
4. Add priorities to roadmap (low medium high)
5. After answering the above questions, whats missing currently from **marketing**
    Things to look at: 
	   - Blogpost schedule - does this align with release schedule 
	   - Tutorial release schedule 
	   - Release schedule
	   - What do we want them to focus on with social media and emails
5. Sam to do - speak to chains in the next 2 weeks to understand more of what else needs to be addedX
	