Authors: @Cavalier_Eth @DocHabanero @afromac @anthonyb.eth
Reviewers: @ElliottWatts
Document state: Still to have budget numbers entered, but we welcome feedback from the community

Product Nest - Season 1 2022

Nest leads - @DocHabanero @MrMadila @anthonyb.eth @edwardk

The Index Coop is a product-driven organization that is supported by the Product Nest. The ultimate goal of Product is to design, build, launch, and maintain highly-profitable on-chain products for the Index Coop. Developing successful products requires deep expertise in several key areas including assessing market demand, determining product design/composition, building product functionality, providing seed and ongoing liquidity, and analyzing product performance.

Product Nest offers the Index Coop community a qualified and experienced team with a proven track record within Index Coop. A number of Product nest members have been hired through the Core Team 1 hiring process.This nest proposal intends to summarize additional budget asks excluding costs incurred through the core hiring process and will be the reference point for what this Nest delivers, responsibilities, and how performance and success are measured.

Product Nest Structure

The Product Nest has 4 Pods with the overarching responsibility for managing the community’s existing products and delivering on the product roadmap. The Pod Leads form an informal Nest leadership group ensuring accountability and focus for the Nest as a whole.

Primary Objectives

Product Nest Pods and deliverables are all focused on supporting the following Index Coop Primary Objectives 2 in Season 1 (Feb 1st - June 30th).

1. Identify financial products that fill a customer need
2. Quickly and efficiently launch secure and successful financial products

Each of these objectives are owned by the Pods.

Product Nest Reporting

Beginning in February 2022, Product Nest will provide transparency into the performance of each Pod via the governance forum on a monthly basis via the Product Nest Monthly Performance Report 4. The format of this report will be iterated over time. With regular updates and accountability nests will become self monitoring through this process, with the goal of creating visibility, enabling reflection and continual learning. Product Nest will regularly update the community regarding its progress in delivering on what it commits to the community within this proposal. Transparency into the Product Nest will help the community stay in-tune with the status of the product roadmap, engineering roadmap, liquidity management, and product performance.

The Product Nest will engage with the community in the following key ways:

• Governance Forum Posts

• Weekly Presentation during the Weekly Standup Meeting

• Bi-weekly Product Nest call on key product and initiative updates

• Monthly Roadmap Presentation from Product Pod

• New product launches will proceed through the DG governance process unless changed

• Discussion of product ideas and launches via discord and forums

• Representative engagement with with Set, and external partners where appropriate

• #product, #engineering, #liquidity and #analytics channels in Discord

• Product and Liquidity Dashboards

• Live Product Roadmap in Notion 1

Product Pod

Contributors: Miles Hitchcock, Alex Cavalier, Cormac Daly, Allan Gulley, Over Analyser, alerex, joseph.knecht@moonrock.org, Seb Pulido, Abel Tedros, Ahuja, Abacus, Sid H

Product Pod is responsible primarily for driving the product launch roadmap as a unified pod now that the Automated Indices and Composite indices pods have combined. In addition, Product Pod will continue to communicate with the community and partners about existing and upcoming products, manage the product governance process, and redesign the product onboarding process to ensure the launch of high quality products in an efficient manner.

Objectives

Launch a portfolio of sustainable and in-demand products by working with Set Labs and other product architecture providers, increasing Index Coop’s product experimentation, and partnering with methodologists that bring technical and market segment expertise.

Deliverables/Responsibilities

To restructure the Product Pod

• Create a single product team that owns the roadmap
• Formalize Product Designer and Quantitative Portfolio Manager positions

To launch products with product-market fit

• Develop a market research and validation function to prioritize the most in-demand products
• Design a novel product launch mechanism to shorten the feedback loop for product-market fit

To build a sustainable product portfolio

• Expand profitable and market-validated products to new chains and layer 2s
• Develop a pricing strategy that finds the ideal fee structure for our products

To expand technical capabilities

• Develop a technical capabilities roadmap for new products and product enhancements
• Seek to harmonize with Set Labs when mutually advantageous
• Reviewed and communicate with technology partners (Set) on a monthly basis

Success Metrics

• Products average $10M of net inflows within 1 month of launch
• Products average 70% contribution margin (net fees after gas) within three months of launch
• Launch seven products

These targets are intentionally ambitious, chosen to force our thinking to the scale required for aggressive growth and the shift towards profitable products.

Pod Budget

[TBC]

Engineering Pod

Contributors: Edward Kim, Noah Citron, Christian Koopman, blockdev, Richard Guan, 0xModene

Engineering Pod is responsible for building and maintaining smart contracts and user-facing Web3 applications. Up until this point the pod has built products exclusively on top of Set Protocol’s smart contracts. However, to give Index Coop the most flexibility and allow the DAO to truly control its own product roadmap, the Engineering Pod aims to build at least one new product that is not reliant on Set Protocol smart contracts during H1 2022.

Objectives

• Unlock new product categories by expanding smart contract functionality
• Increase speed of product build and launch process
• Build and maintain easy-to-use interfaces for our customers and stakeholders to learn about, purchase, and interact with our products

Deliverables/Responsibilities

• Write and deploy smart contracts to launch products on top of Set Protocol
• Write and deploy Exchange Issuance contracts to improve usable liquidity for our products and reduce deviation from NAV
• Perform Smart Contract upgrades for existing products as deemed necessary by the pod in conjunction with the IC community
• Write and deploy adapter contracts to support new DEXs and to support underlying token migrations
• Conduct due diligence on new product ideas to ensure feasibility and estimate effort
• Publish quarterly updates on the engineering roadmap
• Stay up-to-date on L2 developments and inform L2 product strategy
• Establish relationships with external auditors and have a smart contract audit performed on the newly developed protocol
• Build a new smart contract protocol from the ground up which we will use to launch Index Coop products
• Build and maintain a re-designed web application to be hosted on app.indexcoop.com 1
• Integrate Exchange Issuance into app.indexcoop.com 1
• Integrate new products and functions (staking) into the web app
• Proactively monitor errors and user actions on the web app to reduce negative experiences and inform upgrades
• Maintain and improve the Liquidity Analyzer tool
• Maintain and improve the Index Coop blogging platform
• Provide technical assistance for the www.indexcoop.com marketing website
• Build and maintain additional applications as prioritized by the Product Nest

Success Metrics

• In Season 1, deploy 30+ individual smart contracts related to new products and functionality
• By end of Season 1, design and prototype an in-house smart contract protocol for launching index products.
• Launch a newly designed and re-architected app.indexcoop.com 1 before March 15, 2022
• By June 2022, capture >25% of monthly issuance volume through our app (currently 0%)
• By June 2022, capture >10% of monthly swap volume through our app (currently unknown)

Pod Budget

[TBC]

Analytics Pod

Contributors: Anthony Bowman, Sid H, Jack Yin, Don Daryl Bustos

Analytics Pod is responsible for measuring performance throughout the Index Coop with a focus on Core KPIs, Product Performance, and Product Liquidity monitoring.

Objectives

Provides metrics and insights across Nests and the DAO

Deliverables/Responsibilities

To provide the community with accurate and transparent non-financial reporting analysis

• Core KPIs and North Stars Dashboard
• Product-Specific Dashboard
• Revenue, Gross Profitability, Net Dollar Flows, etc Dashboards
• Business Development Dashboards

To support the Product Roadmap by modeling proposed products and product changes

• Profitability Modeling
• Liquidity Modeling
• Risk management of FLIs
• Support modeling for non-Set Protocol products

To explore strategic initiatives and propose changes backed by data

• Layer 2 Strategic Research
• Liquidity Capital Efficiency Research
• Optimization of Fee Structure Research

Success Metrics

• Complete all product-specific dashboards
• Complete Core KPIs & North Stars dashboard
• Complete Product Liquidity Dashboard
• Migrate all dashboards to the Index Coop account

Pod Budget

[TBC]

Liquidity Pod

Contributors:Andrew Jones, Anthony Bowman, Sid H, Jack Yin, Over Analyser,Matthew Graham, Miles Hitchcock, Cormac Daly, Elliott Watts

Index Coop’s mission is to make crypto investing simple, safe, and accessible for everyone. Product growth is a core pillar to achieving that mission. Without sufficient liquidity, our index products are less compelling to customers and product access and therefore adoption is potentially hindered. This slows our growth as a business and the negative effects only compound over time. The Liquidity Pod will work to ensure that all products have sufficient liquidity as outlined in IIP-110 within the funding constraints of IIP-125 1 and done in accordance with the Harmonic Liquidity Vision.

Objectives

• Deploy and manage liquidity for all products and the $INDEX token
• Prudently manage and protect/hedge IC capital under “protocol owned liquidity” (POL) initiatives
• Ensure all liquidity initiatives are sustainable and driven by a net positive ROI mindset

Deliverables/Responsibilities

To provide Index Coop users with a good user experience by optimizing liquidity for minimum access costs

• Seed liquidity pools for product launches
• Monitor liquidity performance via the product liquidity dashboard 2
• Investigate opportunities to increase capital efficiency and lower access costs

Success Metrics

• Maintain an access cost of less than 2% across all products.
• Any losses on capital deployed do not exceed the revenue the products generate.

Pod Budget

This pod is requesting no additional budget for compensation as all of the pod members are compensated by other pods. The budget for this pod has been allocated in IIP-125 1.

Funding Request

[TBC]

Contributor Owl Levels

[TBC]