April 2022
Key Achievements
What we worked on and achieved in the last month. These include some of the key decisions we’ve made about our product direction.
MVP Launch
Our focus last month was to pare down the scope of our product and identify the core features for our MVP. As a refresher, we wanted to ensure compatibility between the push/pull and p2p networks, allow teams to find and clone projects, and collaborate using patches. I’m excited to say - the team’s been able to achieve all of this! With our 0.3.0 release, Upstream is now ready to be used by teams for their core code collaboration needs.
More details on our 0.3.0 release here:
https://community.radworks.org/t/radicle-upstream-v0-3-0-is-out/2812
New Onboarding Flow
We’ve greatly improved our app onboarding flow. Not only is it much more friendly, but we also perform a number of system checks to make sure your environment is all ready to go. The checks the rad-cli, upstream-cli, and Rad ID. That way we can make sure that you’re able to use all of the features in Radicle. Further, we’ve also integrated with your ssh-agent so your password only needs to be input once per session. Subsequent app opens will detect your Radicle ID and automatically unlock.
More details here:
https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle-upstream/issues/2802
Initial DAO Onboarding
Working with the growth team (shoutout @nas and @LukeF), we’ve created an Early Contributor Program to get DAOs on board to Upstream. The program will incentivize DAO members to try out Radicle and provide useful feedback for our products. We have initial onboarding sessions set up with Web3UI, B3nz, DevNode, and Bankless.
More details here:
https://pitch.com/public/00265fa9-24db-4179-b62d-0531842b43a3
Our Focus
What we’re currently focusing on in the immediate and short term. Expect to see some of these conclude very soon!
Patch Statuses
Once we implemented patches, it became clear that statuses are the logical next step to improve the overall experience. Statuses achieve 2 primary things: 1) it’ll allow users to close non-relevant patches, and 2) it’ll be clearer to users which patches have been merged or closed.
More details here:
https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle-upstream/issues/2782
Commenting
The next step to further improve the code collaboration experience is commenting. The first area that we’ll be implementing a commenting system is with patches. This will allow users to communicate with their team members within the context of the project that they’re collaborating on. Further, the commenting system built here will lay the groundwork for commenting on various features, including Issues.
More details here:
https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle-upstream/issues/2796
Organizations Discovery
One thing we know will be needed by DAOs is organization management. We’re currently in the process of identifying the core user needs and problems that we’ll need to tackle with this feature. It will be important for us to make sure that we clearly define and prioritize core user problems to reduce the risk of scope creep. Overall, this will allow DAOs to effectively manage their projects within their organization.
More details here:
https://www.figma.com/file/nDjyGjPniq2WcVfv80BEJj/Organizations?node-id=0%3A1
Gather Feedback
Just as with last month, this is a core focus for us. Especially now that we’re beginning to onboard DAOs, our focus is to ensure that we have an effective system to capture and synthesize their feedback into actionable product improvements. This will help us prioritize key valuable features for Upstream.
More details here:
What’s Next
Core initiatives and features that we’ll be focusing on in the longer term. Just some of the exciting things we have in store!
Issue Management (carryover)
With our core MVP features, teams will still need to rely on external tools for things like project management and communication. We’ll be expanding our use of the commenting system (which we will have for Patches) as well as key issue management features so teams can progressively rely on Radicle for larger parts of their workflow.
Core Task: Define issue management features and implement in Upstream
Ethereum Integration (carryover)
DAOs intrinsically are web3 native teams, and most utilize the Ethereum blockchain. Although we do have some features around this already, we’ve decided to remove them to focus on the MVP as they were problematic. Moving forward, we need to better identify and understand how users and teams want Radicle to integrate with the blockchain, and what aspects of Radicle should be integrated with on-chain data.
Core Task: Define user needs, problems and jobs to be done with the Ethereum integration. Identify technical implementation and design needs.
Competitive Landscape / Roadmap
This past month, we’ve defined the vision and high-level strategic priorities for Upstream. That said, additional work needs to be done to put together the roadmap for the product. The roadmap will be critical for prioritization once we establish a feedback pipeline. Further, diving deep into the competitor landscape will help us inform our priority features.
Core Task: Roadmap template created and competitive analysis done