We continue to focus on just the things that are funded and not on what we should do

Participants:

• Taylor
• Kathy
• Roger
• Brad
• Arturo

Summary written up afterwards

There are two pieces to look at for a solution: immediate next steps to get us back on track, and process changes to do it better in the future.

Immediate next steps:

• We should hold "wishlist retreats" where we just brainstorm things we ought to do, separate from what the current funding is.

Process changes:

• We need to roadmap by wishlist item, then match items to existing funding.
• We need to do periodic task check-ins, to decide if a given deliverable is still the best thing for us to be doing.
  • What we mean by periodic can vary by team. Monthly or something?
  • Remember that our funders want us to be doing the right things, so they will generally be pleased for us to swap bad items for good ones.
  • This is course requires good funder relationships, and also concise accurate communications about constraints.
• "Think goals, not deliverables". That is, we should roadmap by category ("performance", "security", "maintainability", etc) rather than by funder.

Notes

• Also tor browser has similar issues

• They wonder oh my why that is on my roadmap

Taylor: it is ultimately toxic to the longterm health of the org and project

We should periodically refresh what we have somehow committed to.

Some companies used to have a Friday when people could do what they want. What if we had a free day where people can do what they want.

Whenever we allocate to make the roadmap everybody gets to decide something to put on the roadmap.

Important to discuss these things also with Shari to ensure that we are moving more towards this direction instead of having funding that has more administrative burden.

More private sources have less compliance requirements. But they also less money, so you need more.

We are closer to getting private like funding sources, than what we may think that is.

Invert the road-mapping progress, prioritise without having in mind who is going to pay for things and then come up with who is going to pay for it.

Brad: suggests doing mid-point re-evaluations.

Now all the teams are road-mapping on their own, we should roadmap together more.

When you budget for your time, it's nice to have spare time available to allocate to unpredictable incident response like things.

Practical ideas to do:

• A wishlist retreat where we do a roadmap that is just driven by what you want to do, instead of funder driven.

• Have periodic retrospective check-ins to ensure we have mapped up well, what we proposed to get funding for vs what we did or wanted to do.

Set milestones dynamically based on progress you have make so far.

Think goals, not deliverables. Ruthlessly prioritise.

An incrementally updated backlog of things that you would like to do,