Why this page?

Grants 2.0 organizes its work around some core concepts and principles. This page lays out some of the key pieces of that organization to make it easier for our stakeholders (that’s you) to follow along with our progress.

Units of Work

We structure our product development by thinking in different sized units of work. From largest to smallest, those units are:

• Goals — large, ambitious aims that reflect some part of Gitcoin’s long-term strategy (maybe Gitcoin-level OKRs) and are generally pursued over the course of a year or more.
  • Example: “Hit $500m in total funding for grants.”
• Outcomes — milestones that we believe will help us achieve an organizational goal if we hit them. They generally exist on a multi-quarter time horizon.
  • Example: “Increase the average contributions per grant by 30% YoY.”
• Opportunities — hypotheses for how we can hit a given strategic outcome. Opportunities tend to be pursued over a quarter or two.
  • Example: “Increase contributions from referral links by 50% from last Grants round”.
• Stories — discrete pieces of work that achieve a contained goal for a specific type of user. This is generally small enough to be completed in a day or two (or less!) of engineering work. These are written as an outcome for the target user (using Gherkin acceptance criteria), so that the team is able to think creatively about the best way to achieve that goal with the product.
  • Example: “As a grant owner, I want to know when my grant is approved so that I can share it with my community.”

Categorizing new ideas into these different-sized units enables us to evaluate how they match up to our strategy and make quicker decisions.

Backlogs

We essentially use two backlogs to orchestrate our development workflow:

• Product Backlog — the product backlog is for refining big ideas or goals into smaller problem statements for which we can then build software solutions. Outcomes and Opportunities live here while we work their problem space. You can see how we flow through this process on this Miro board, and see the Grants backlog here.
• Engineering Backlog — this is where stories live, and it is reserved for clearly-defined work that is ready for an engineer to build. If something has made it to the Engineering Backlog, it will typically be worked on soon.

Other Resources

Product & Protocol Support Playbook

Grants Product Request Form