A vision for Q2-2021

Governance
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Summary

Q1-2021 is long in the books. Now, we must look towards what we want to achieve as a community in the rest of Q2-2021.

The goal of this post is to share

  1. A work-in-progress vision of the Coop to help orient us with a long-term perspective
  2. 3 objectives to guide us this quarter
  3. 4 key performance indicators (KPIs) to help us know whether we are on track towards those objectives

Vision :telescope:

The Index Coop is on a mission to make crypto investing simple, safe, and accessible for everyone.

To achieve this mission over the long term, the Coop must invest in 3 areas:

  • Product growth
  • Community autonomy
  • Protocol sustainability

Balancing these three priorities is not easy.

Yet, if we are successful, the outcome will be massive. The Coop will continue to be a model for other crypto communities to follow. We will have balanced 1) creating value for our stakeholders with 2) building a DeFi Citadel while 3) shipping & growing at startup speed.

Here are some rough ideas for what that end-state of the Coop might look like:

  • Model Crypto Citizen: We are known in crypto as being a model of a well-run DAO that produces impact & outcomes. This will attract high-quality stakeholders and create a positive feedback loop.
  • Startup-like: The Index Coop is a startup (Paul Graham & Steve Blank offer two widely-accepted definitions). Success will follow if we borrow values, thinking, and actions crucial for tech startup success.
  • Global: We have active, engaged community members in crypto-epicenters around the world.
  • Balanced governance: Influence is balanced between major stakeholders.
  • Fluid power: Self-forming, delivering, and dissolving teams are the primary way we tackle problems as a community.
  • Self-perpetuating: Coop leaders of all kinds create new leaders to ensure the community continues to improve and grow.
  • DeFi Leaders: We envision the Coop as the training ground for the next generation of crypto and DeFi leaders. We hope that this community will help spawn the protocol founders and crypto leaders of tomorrow. These community members will continue to deeply engage with Index Coop and spread the Coop gospel (recruiting, protocol politicking, other collaboration).

These ideas are still early and need feedback/sharpening from all Coop stakeholders.

Objectives & KPIs :bar_chart:

To make progress towards this vision in Q2-2021, here are 3 objectives to keep in mind:

  • Product growth - The Coop solidifies its lead as the #1 DeFi index manager.
  • Community autonomy - The Coop has evolved into an even more autonomous organization. A diverse and engaged community is an unforkable advantage for long-term success.
  • Protocol sustainability - Protocol resources are managed in a trust-building & resilient manner. Trust, security, careful risk management, and treasury management are crucial pillars.

We are already on our way to each of these objectives as a community :muscle: This is thanks to the massive, Coop culture-defining effort by everyone last quarter.

To offer some targets (KPIs) that will help us know whether we are on track towards those objectives, here are 4 product growth goals:

  • $500M AUM
  • 400,000+ DPI supply units
  • $9M FLI suite 7-day moving average volume for 2 consecutive weeks
  • 4 new products launched with $200M+ combined TVL. They are category leaders in terms of the most relevant measure (i.e. uTVL, volume, liquidity)

These goals reflect a few core beliefs, including that we must:

  • Continually focus our efforts on growth to ensure long-term success
  • Double (and triple) down on winning products
  • Launch new products that have the potential to become category leaders

Now is the time for focus, great execution, and learning together through it all.

Questions for you :thinking:

  • What about this does or does not resonate with you?
  • What is your long-term vision for the Coop?
  • What questions & thoughts (big & small) does it generate in you?

None of it is set in stone, and the only way we move forward effectively is together :owl: :owl: :owl:

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Thank you for your hard-work putting this together @anon10525910!

Over the past months I have been lucky to work with many of the major Index Coop stakeholders - specifically DeFi Pulse and Set Protocol. One of my biggest learnings from this work is the profound alignment and support from major stakeholders around our community goals. I firmly believe that everyone is on the same page and moving in the same direction.

DAOs live and die based on the strength of the partnerships they form. Every protocol within this space is deeply tied into other protocols and organizations - no DAO is an island! We are extremely lucky to have strong partnerships and alignment with some of the leading organizations in this space.

In my opinion, one of the most important steps a decentralized organization can take is when the community starts to drive enterprise level initiatives. We have already taken major steps forward in this domain - specifically with the launch of the Metaverse Index (driven by @DarkForestCapital and @verto0912 ) and the establishment of the GWG (led by @LemonadeAlpha and @reganbozman).

This post lays out some very ambitious goals - it is clear to me that in order to accomplish these goals we need to level up as a DAO and start to truly drive enterprise level results. We have one of the most talented and driven communities in DeFi - it is time to execute.

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The phrase “enterprise level results” rings true :raised_hands:

One question on my mind for communal consideration is, “What is missing or making it hard for us to drive those today?”

Surfacing those challenges will go a long way to helping us achieve these big goals.

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While I agree that tracking KPIs is a great way to determining whether we are making progress or not.

I’m more or else these days thinking about what the next ‘big’ challenge for Index Coop might be.

(as an example)

What would it take for one of the Coop’s products to reach top 100 CMC, let alone perhaps become the first ever structured Index product to break that barrier? While I generally regard CMC as a vanity metric, achieving that not would not only imply one of our products to gain $1B+ TVL but also the weight of achieving that would imo would really widen the funnel of awareness for Index itself.

For us to orientate around such a ‘moon landing’ moment, it would help scrutinize our efforts regarding whether it would help us drive towards that goal or not vs. optimising for individual KPIs/metrics (great as measuring sticks imo but not so great north stars)

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This is a great point to highlight. Communities grow with time. When Index Coop is a $100 billion asset manager our capabilities will be far different than today. The definition of Enterprise Level Results also changes over time. A few months ago a big accomplishment was figuring out a $1000 ad partnerships, today we regularly fund +$100k initiatives.

If we want to level up as a community and continue to grow on this front it comes down to two things.

  1. Experience: Every week our collective experience grows. Each transaction and initiative is easier than the one before it. Minor partnerships teach the hard won lessons to execute major partnerships.

  2. Confidence: Our community is still young and we are still learning. With learning comes increased confidence. Every time a community members raises their hand to participate and help out our collective confidence grows.

Experience and confidence take time to develop. Today we do not have the capabilities or understanding to complete a $500 m sale of $DPI to Goldman Sachs- however that story will be very different a year from now.

We develop these capabilities by developing a culture of learning and mutual respect - where every member feels valued and appreciated. We do that be holding people to a high standard and expecting big results.

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Thanks Greg,

from the growth marketing side of things, my goals internally for Q2 have been centered around building a content and distribution machine which greatly exceeds our previous efforts:

  • Improving impressions from ~270k/week (3.2m/12 weeks) → 3m/week between Coop and adjacently tracked accounts (Impression mining, influencers)

  • Improving high quality med-long form content production from 1/month (product launches) → 4/month

  • Exploring localization efforts in high leverage geographies (China) to maximize our content

  • Developing a launch+1 plan to standardize the highest leverage post-launch growth tactics

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What are the 4 new products? I’m guessing BTC2x-FLI and BED but not sure on the other two.

Thank you for putting this together @anon10525910.

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BTC2x-FLI and SDI have passes DG2 and will be launched.

The others in the pipeline are BED, dXIV, SYI, PMI and DeFi Pulse are also working on a middleware/infrastructure index. I think we could probably do other FLI products.

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That’s a great question, it totally depends on what methodologists cook up and what the Coop approves in DG1/DG2 voting.

As it stands today:

  • MVI was launched in Q2, so we gotta grow it
  • SMI was just approved
  • BTC-FLI was just approved
  • ??
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100%

These KPIs are intentionally short term (end of Q2-2021) and designed to orient us for just the next 2 months.

We should start the discussion as a community on what a longer term “moon landing” goal may be. That’ll provide a lot of clarity and direction.

It’d be awesome to hear what ideas folks have for a “moon landing” goal :raised_hands:

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Amazing post @anon10525910 I believe it is crucial that we continue to set and track targets to monitor just how far we have come and where we are heading!

For me as long as we are keeping with our vision of making DeFi more accessible through our products we will always find long term success. I believe FLIETH is a great example of this as we simplified the use of Compound, packaging the usage of Compound into a ERC-20 token is revolutionary, and it shows in the success of the product. My focus from a growth perspective is how can we replicate this process with other protocols? How can we embed DeFi protocol usage into the DNA of our products? How can our products showcase the fundamental value of DeFi to masses?

I believe the next huge indexes after the FLI product suite will be:

  1. SYI by @Matthew_Graham simplifies stable coin yield aggregation
  2. dVIX simplifies smart contract on-chain options.

Another topic that I believe is interesting is how we are using our governance token to drive the success of our indexes. LM is a core part of the success of our products and developing a strategy to optimize LM will be hugely benificial especially if we are going through a bear market or a period of flat growth.

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Status Update

  • $304 / $500 AUM (DeFi Llama)
  • 325k / 400k DPI Supply Units (KPIs Dashboard)
  • $9MM FLI-Suite Vol. — [No] 5/1/21: $7MM & 5/9/221: $14MM
  • 1 / 4 new products launched with ~$6M / $200M TVL
    • MVI

Progress Since Original Post

** incomplete list; going for speed vs. perfection

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@anon10525910, thank you for your contribution. Reading your posts convinced me to join the IndexCoop DAO. It’s rare to find such execution quality in DAO or, even in more traditional organizations. I have reviewed the Q1 OKR as well, as the post regarding North Stars and Core KPI.

I love that the community is using OKR. It’s tough to set up OKR and keep the rhythm over time. I stumbled a lot of times, at different organizations, before having wide adoption of good quality OKR. The difficulty is worth it because lack of alignment, particularly in DAO, is the number-one obstacle between strategy and execution. Also, having contributors thinking about the whole business is a massive accelerator regarding a team’s output. As Eric Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, noted: “OKR changed the course of the company forever.”

Timing & Review

That’s great that IndexCoop has a quarterly OKR cadence because it’s best suited to keep pace with the fast-changing crypto market. Do we have a quarterly meeting to discuss OKR results? I have only found this post so far. It’s crucial to reflect and challenge ourselves on why some OKRs were achieved and others not. We also have to answer questions regarding obstacles we encounter or the quality of the OKR of the previous quarter.

Objectives

According to the book Measure What Matters, one of the best book on OKR, objectives are the “what”.

They express goals and intents, are aggressive yet realistic, must be tangible , objective , and unambiguous ; should be obvious to a rational observer whether an objective has been achieved. The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for the company.

Reading your post, I understand that our three objectives are:

  • Product growth - The Coop solidifies its lead as the #1 DeFi index manager.
  • Community autonomy - The Coop has evolved into an even more autonomous organization. A diverse and engaged community is an unforkable advantage for long-term success.
  • Protocol sustainability - Protocol resources are managed in a trust-building & resilient manner. Trust, security, careful risk management, and treasury management are crucial pillars.

I don’t have enough knowledge yet to judge the relevance of the objectives - they seem all smart - but I think we can improve the readability. It’s essential to have clear and concise objectives that all teammates can memorize. For instance, it could be:

Objective 1: Be the #1 DeFi index manager

Objective 2: Grow and strengthen our community

Objective 3: Manage the protocol resources carefully

Key Results

Key results are the “How”. Key results have an ambitious number to hit as well as a deadline. There is no place for approximation or half commitment—only outputs matter.

According to the book Measure What Matters, they:

  • express measurable milestones which, if achieved, will advance objective(s) in a useful manner to their constituents;
  • must describe outcomes, not activities . If your KRs include words like “consult,” “help,” “analyze,” or “participate,” they describe activities.
  • Instead, describe the end-user impact of these activities: " publish average and tail latency measurements from six Colossus cells by March 7 ," rather than “assess Colossus latency”;
  • must include evidence of completion. This evidence must be available, credible, and easily discoverable. Examples of evidence include change lists, links to docs, notes, and published metrics reports.

There are two types of KR, committed and aspirational. Committed ones must be met 100%, while aspirational ones should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. Aspirational KR pushes the organization to reach new heights - to grow 10x, not 10%. It’s the kind of “next big challenge” that @pet3rpan mentioned. I believe IndexCoop’s key results should be very hard because it drives performance more effectively than semi-ambitious goals. An easy way to draft KR is to start with the objectives and add “as measured by”. For instance, it could be:

Objective 1: Be the #1 DeFi index manager

Key Result 1: as measured by, reach $500M AUM before August 31

Key Result 2: as measured by, supply 400,000 DPI units before August 31

I’m worried that our key results aren’t ambitious enough. Forty-one days before the end of the quarter, we have almost already reached most of our key results. By the way, thank you, @anon10525910, for the following posts giving a status update. I also suggest that we start measuring, not with the growth quarter over quarter but, with a percentage of OKR success. For instance, it could be:

Objective 1: Be the #1 DeFi index manager

Key Result 1: as measured by, reach $500M AUM before August 31 => 61% so far

Key Result 2: as measured by, supply 400,000 DPI units before August 31 => 65% so far

Cascading OKR

Ideally, the DAO will have its higher lever OKR, and different teams will have specific OKR that cascade from those high-level OKR. Theoretically, a key result of IndexCoop general OKR should be an objective for a particular section such as the Business Development team. In an ideal situation, @LemonadeAlpha’s team should have its own OKR that cascade from the DAO’s main OKR.

Modyfing OKR during a cycle

It’s hard to nail OKR each quarter. We should be allowed to modify them if an objective or a key result no longer makes sense. Sometimes the right key result surfaces weeks after it’s put into play.

Recommendations:

1/ Set-up quarterly meeting to review OKRs

2/ Review OKR progresses every Monday to drive alignment

3/ Rewrite our three objectives to increase readability

4/ Find three ambitious key results, with a deadline, for each objective

5/ Create OKR for every team

I propose to scale what we are already doing. I’m no OKR guru but I have set up OKR several times at different organizations. I’m ready to help if it’s needed :slight_smile:

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Status Update

  • $232M / $500M AUM (DeFi Llama )
  • 411K / 400K DPI Supply Units (KPIs Dashboard) :white_check_mark:
  • $9M FLI-Suite Vol.
    • ETH2x-FLI: $24M & $11M
    • BTC2x-FLI: ~$2M & $817K
  • 2 / 4 new products launched with ~$10.5M / $200M TVL
    • MVI: $3.8M
    • BTC2x-FLI: $6.7M

:tada:

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I think the Coop team is one of the most hard working I seen from so many other projects.
Everything is transparent and the updates are constant.
I can see Index growing and growing and I am happy for the opportunity to grow along with the project
Onwards and upwards!

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