Clarifying Swarm Lead Responsibilities @ Status for Q2

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Background

As a Meritocracy, Status aims to reward leaders who deliver the greatest impact to the organization. At the same time, individuals who take on positions of leadership are often unclear on their responsibilities.

A brainstorm session was held on the 1st of May to discuss leadership at Status, with a summary and resulting proposal outlined below.

Swarms Leads in Q2

Preamble:

  • This is a flexible and imperfect proposal, something we can try for now as we move towards the DAO.
  • All swarms and their structures should be revisited every quarter and adjusted accordingly.
    • i.e. The list of swarms below are set for Q2 2019, and can be adjusted in Q3 as swarms are created/merged/disbanded
  • Each lead has the responsibilities defined below
    • Note: There are edge cases where a couple swarm leads will not have all the responsibilities from the first day. We need to be pragmatic before we overburden certain swarm leads (i.e. Core and Core UI) with additional work.

The list of swarm leads in Q2:

Responsibilities of Swarm Lead

  • Swarm performance

    • Continuous improvement (holding retrospectives etc.)
    • Setting, prioritising, tracking and accountability for milestones, team roadmap and deliverables.
    • Make sure there are clear goals for the swarm
    • Responsible for improving the quality and output of the swarm
    • Coordination of team’s efforts

  • Resourcing

    • Engaging people necessary to successfully achieve the goals of the swarm
    • Lateral leadership and influencing across Status
    • Managing headcount
    • Identifying hiring needs
    • Hiring

  • Finance

    • Compensation
    • Budgeting
    • Approving expense requests within the team budget

  • People development

    • Giving feedback (both informally on the job, and working with People Ops to hold feedback rounds)
    • Create clear process and expectations for swarm members.
    • Mentorship to the team
    • Supporting onboarding, helping new joiners find their feet
    • Recognition (kudos etc.)

  • Being a figurehead

    • Comms (giving Town Hall updates, posting to Discuss, updating Wrike)
    • Managing and communicating lifecycle of a swarm properly.
    • Being in an interface to the rest of the world.

Tools/resources

The following is an expanding list of tools that can be used to provide support to leads in executing on your teams mission. They include:

  1. Wrike, Pivotal tracker and/or Github: Used for milestones/tracking/roadmap
  2. Lead Guide: (coming soon - POps putting this together)
  3. Greenhouse: Hiring
  4. Kudos DApp: Recognition
  5. People Ops: Useful to be aware of these for team member requests, e.g. travel
  6. BambooHR: team availability calendar
  7. Peer Feedback: Find the template here for setting up bi-annual feedback
  8. Team budget: Leads can use their budget allocation to e.g. approve conference attendance requests, or give pay increases. Ping Dani for any questions regarding this.

Any questions, comments, critiques, proposals or improvements, please ping [email protected], respond inline, or message me on Status with the feedback.

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