List of participants (16)
- Bastian Waidelich
- Christian Müller
- Karsten Dambekalns
- Markus Günther
- Wilhelm Behnke
- Denny Lubitz
- Bernhard Schmitt
- Roland Schütz
- Marc Henry Schulz
- Marika Hauke
- Sebastian Helzle
- Felix Gradinaru
- David Spiola
- Martin Ficzel
- Robert Lemke
- Tobias Gruber
Summary of the retro
- input from everybody regarding their current view on the Neos project
- 4 focus group discussions on topics distilled from the previous input
- Community Management
- Innovation
- Team
- Marketing
- lunch break
- team activity and contribution discussion
- new Contributor role within Neos Community discussion and decision
- external marketing text creation discussion and decision
- community management discussion
input from everybody
See translation into English below.
Notes from the 4 focus groups
Innovation (1nn0v4710n)
Robert:
- Innovation was always important in the project
- Was always the driving force and resulting projects were permanently pursued
- There used to be “more innovation”, various projects on important features in Neos
- How can we promote this “culture” again?
Karsten:
- there used to be more tinsel core development for customer projects
- because we don’t have customers who potentially need Neos 9 right now, there is no cross-financing to participate in Neos 9 development
- customers are basically satisfied with what Neos can do, so there is not the big new feature that we were asked for
- the web has changed compared to “before” (e.g. 10 years ago) - apps instead of web, …
Martin:
- there is still potential for innovation at a detailed level (fusion etc.)
- Flow: you would need static analysis, type safety, to enable the next innovations
- Flow is to a certain extent stuck at a certain level
- create Neos / Flow 10 branches immediately after Neos / Flow 9
Robert:
- don’t get too lost in the details, we need new visions to guide us
Basti:
- Innovation / R&D is the topic that interests / triggers me the most
- Danger of cargo cult, just to catch up quickly
- real innovation is a completely new need or something that creates a need that users were not aware of before
Roland:
- Web UI has a lot of catch-up potential
- 80% of people do web tasks on smartphones, we still have nothing to offer in this respect
- New exciting features tend to emerge in silos - one develops this, the other that, but there is no common larger plan
Basti:
- analyze what possibilities Neos 9 / the new CR opens up for us, not just small things but also disruptive features
- a by-product of the Neos 9 project is also a new way of thinking that has developed in our company
Martin:
- we are good at evolution (UI, CR)
- be more courageous here
- become more open to “external” innovation (e.g. in the field of AI) through interfaces (something like asset sources for AI?)
Karsten:
- technical innovation vs. innovative overall product / functions
- how do you recognize things that really help users (in the future) to implement them?
Basti:
- in the past, the real innovations were not sudden aha moments but the growing understanding of how things need to be structured
Robert:
- Product Market Fit vs. Eat your own pizza
- Find basic topics - e.g. look, can you replace product X with Neos, how can you do this (even better)?
Community Manager (CM)
Tasks:
- Task Community Manager: People in the Neos team, connect, you want to do marketing? Get to the right people
- Communicator (internal - external, internal-internal)
- Bridge/link between new people and the team and within the team itself (and satellite members)
- Organize sprints and support them (when is it convenient, how and on which topics?)
- Discuss Post: How to make a Sprint (Handbook) → CM promoted Sprint in the Neos Team
- CMS Garden Meetings, Representative (Neos needs more presence at other conferences)
- Encourage people from the community to attend a team meeting
- Must always be informed or know what is currently going on in the team
- Delegate questions
- Take care of team members who are inactive, for example (ask, follow up)?
- Celebrate successes and recognize contributors (event?)
- At least 1-2 people who take care of new people at sprints or conferences
- Include in sprint planning! EXPLICIT
- CM should be several people (geographically smartly distributed)
Questions:
- Who and how many?
- How?
- What is not part of the CM’s tasks?
Team
- Return of the Kitchen Duties: responsibilities, who takes over
- Different levels of visibility: Neos 9 very prominent, other areas also active (e.g. marketing,) but not as visible (also for interested parties)
- Displeasure about different activity
- Idea: Would a return to smaller teams improve the situation?
- Active Contributor role as an alternative to Team Member for people who are more likely to find themselves there
- Unclear: Where is there a need for contribution?
Marketing
- Review
- Comparatively little has happened recently.
- Marketing topics and technical topics were often closely linked - this made coordination difficult.
- It was difficult to integrate new people into the marketing team.
- Experiment
- Test run with external marketing support (4h).
- Planned workflow: content → dev team → technical translators → external marketing expert.
- Goal: Improve reach & visibility, with a reasonable return on investment.
- Neos rebranding
- The rebranding has split into several groups or sub-projects - not good
- Which channels do we want to use?
- (Discussion point - decision open)
- Next steps
- Bring more life into the marketing group. → New ideas, clearer tasks, targeted approach to contributors.
team activity and contribution discussion
Outcomes
Most import for us are the following guiding ideas for team membership:
- We want to have people participating in decisions who are currently actively involved in the project. Instead of people, who were active in the past and are not any more.
- We consider people as active team members if they contributed something meaningful in the last 6 months.
- Team members who were active in the past and are still reachable for discussions, inputs and consultation are also valuable for the project.
- Our values are very important for team membership.
- We want to make contributions as easy as possible - without compromising security.
- Switching between active and on-break/inactive state for team members is super easy.
Regarding decision making:
- our decision framework still holds value:
- small decisions can be made quickly by a small number of people
- big decisions get more time for consideration and require more people to vote
- to make it easier to vote for people who are not knowledgeable in a topic, the abstain option is understood as “I abstain and trust the team decision”. Voting this shows the team that the team member considered the decision and actively participates
Contributor role within Neos Community
Draft RFC by Markus: New community role Contributor.pdf | Slack
Editable version for Neos Team members.
Main idea:
- give (technical) permissions for community contributors in tools to make contributions easier
Team decision: We will try it out as an experiment. Markus will implement his suggested permissions in the various tools. The discussion how this role is given to community members - and possibly removed - has been postponed.
external marketing text creation
Team decision: We will do the experiment to use Neos Foundation budget to get external writer(s) to write marketing texts for the Neos project.
People working to implement the decision:
- Sebastian Helze
- Marika Tran
- David Spiola
Community Management
Discussion with the following key points:
- we distinguished community internal focus from externally focused Evangalism
- Community Management would be very helpful if it for example did:
- respond on GitHub - to first issues, comments, pull requests etc.
- respond in Discuss and Slack
- the role would be very visible and show activity in the community
- the discussing team members were open to the idea of using Neos Foundation budget in the future to give continuity and focus to this task
English translation of initial thoughts on the Neos project
- (1) Losing Touch
- More meetings vs. commitments
- (2) Community / User Growth
- Contact with the community
- Previously: Twitter
- Today: ?
- (3) Contribution to Neos 9
- Focus too low
- Hyper-focus on Neos 9
- Pre-release (?)
- Difficult to maintain contact
- (4) Own Coding
- Head is exhausted
- Other forms of contribution instead of code
- (5) Rare Team Meetings
- Few participants
- No notes taken anymore
- (6) Neos 9 as Relief
- Desire to gain relief through Neos 9
- (7) Perceived Injustice
- Neos 9 creates a lot of dependency
- Others contribute less
- (8) Internationality
- Market share stagnating?
- Innovation?
- (9) Role as a Non-Coder
- Counsel for the team
- When and for what to be available
- (10) “Awesome System”
- Personal meetings motivate
- However, traveling is difficult
- New talent is less forthcoming
- Other distractions, universities, etc.
- (11) Re-entering Contribution
- Focus on #Neos 9
- (12) Personal Balance
- Contribution vs. burden
- (13) Community Manager
- In the Neos 9 project: quick feedback, funding, focus
- Neos 9 → new momentum
- (14) Marketing “dead?”
- Promise vs. delivery
- Is the Neos “honeymoon” over?