To aid our Compensation Program design efforts leading into Cycle 5, @ui369.eth and I are making a list of skill domains and capabilities for DAOhaus-related work and would like your help brainstorming and refining. would like your help in identifying skill domains for DAOhaus-related work.
We have two goals here (resulting in two separate lists):
Identify a set of skills that apply to specific kinds of work (eg roughly mapping to our circles), that can be used to help determine appropriate compensation.
Identify a set of general capabilities that will be relevant to facilitating high quality contributor feedback, performance assessment, and contributor growth.
Below are our preliminary lists. What would you add? Can/should any be combined?
1. Skill Domains
Smart contract development
Other programming/development
Product management & strategy
Project management
Written communication
Oral communication
Graphic Design / UI Design
UX Design
Community building
Tokenomics & revenue / value accrual
Partnerships & Business Development
Accounting
Mechanism and system design
DAO ecosystem & DAO design knowledge
Leadership
possibly more of a general capability, but categorizing here since it’s so valuable / rare
Dropping in here from the outerlands! I’m Loie, I hail from the People Ops Guild and Gitcoin. (As the People Ops Lead at Gitcoin, I’m researching other org’s comp models and Spencer and I just connected on this)
I’ve got some questions:
a) how do you plan to use these skill lists? Can someone have just 1 skill on the list and be compensated for it? Some skills I see here stand alone: development, written communication, design. Some don’t so much: mechanism/system design, partnerships/bizdev, product mgmt without ecosystem knowledge etc. These are the skills that, in my experience, when folks come in having just 1 skill on the list and it’s one of these, they don’t function well as a holistic contributor. They could be a consultant or Subject Matter Expert but their knowledge always needs to be contextualized by those with a broader understanding, who hit several of these skill categories.
b) the general capabilities i see are a great list! I’m curious how you plan to use those bc the goals states “will be relevant to facilitating high quality contributor feedback, performance assessment, and contributor growth.” - that sounds like it’s all about the care labor skills/people management. But i feel like the list I see under #2 reaches a lot wider than people management. It seems like a prerequisite for working in a DAO. Or at least that someone would have 5/7 on that list. To me, this capability list would not only be relevant to what was listed in the goals, but also to: efficient work, decentralized decision making, working in public, ability to ship, ability to pivot etc etc all these things that are necessary to successful DAOs in general.
For 2., one idea I had is that people in this space seem to either have either rigorous deep knowledge in their area of expertise, or the ability to learn disparate skills & willingness to wear multiple hats. One challenge in compensation might be how to weigh the contributions of these two types of contributors.
I think that skills development should also be a part of the conversation. I understand the urgency for making changes and development can be more of a long term goal but it is quite a normal thing to do.
I just want to draw some comparisons to my irl life, which is working in the nuclear industry. In that, I constantly have to upgrade my skills and check my knowledge of skills through training. Sometimes in class training but mostly computer based. Every few months I have to update which courses are due, in order to prove and upgrade my skill set. Often times people skills are even surfaced through that training and development.
My feeling is there has to be a path for people to improve and people need to be shown how to follow that path. For example, onboarding to warcamp is not great. It’s like “you’re here now figure it out” is not a good way to surface skills.
Can you elaborate here? Is there a specific domain you think is most important (e.g. product R&D) or do you think R&D in general is a domain of its own?
R&D may involve things the Rage team does, like exploring other protocols in other to provide new products and/or better DAO services. Or Paladins collaborating with Rangers & design Magesmiths on user Ux research. I can list other examples with Alchemists but I think research is implicitly considered in the tokenomics & mechanism design fields
All great questions, and we haven’t gone deep enough on this thread to have any data-backed insights yet. We’ve been using a 1-5 “value level” self assessment - with that linked to compensation. The levels are pretty broadly defined, not linked to skills or anything specific. We found most people ended up rating themselves a 4 or a 5 - and we’ve had some back and forth on what that means.
The skills discussion came up through a larger discussion about budgeting & focus. We’re considering changing the value levels to 1-10, changing the name to something like “Market Value Level” and then attempting to have individuals end up with a number 1-10 that represents the market value of the skills they have and actively use in service of the DAO. Then linking that number to compensation. Trying to “keep it simple” with one value level per contributor, but also have the resulting number be aggregate of various important signals - skills being one of them.
This is all propositional… just some ideas a few of us had, so don’t consider this as anything like our new policy.
I do sense the need to at least identify skills that we need in the DAO, and probably to have some link to compensation there based on demand and market realities.