Poll Results on Strategies: Hires

To build the best product, we need the best developers. To have more of the good products, we need product people and good partners.

🛡Rongjian

TBH, we can’t hire executives with 1M comp in the current job market at SV

🏃Leo

First of all, hiring 20 people in what time frame? I’m always most conservative, not about the money, but about diluting the communication and culture. Imagine 50 people at an offsite even trying to get 5-10 minutes of speaking time each. That said, we should go heavy on builders of the core platform. Other things like partnership and marketing can be achieved through fellows, community, agencies, DAOs, etc.

🎽Li

It is a no brainer that we need more devs. Partnership is important for me as well as marketing and the executive hire for marketing (CMO, a qualified web3 candidate). Product person/team without web3 experience/expertise is not good.

🏏Ganesha

🛹Peter

Product, Development and Marketing. We have enough smart people that can work on partners and we can promote smart people from within for Executive positions. We need more devs to build. More Product Managers to track, launch and maintain product, and we need marketers to help us tell our story to the world.

🌲Sam

Now is the time build and build fast! I agree with Li that the overhead of increasing headcount will slow us down - at least initially. Engineering should not be a bottleneck for our growth.

☁️Giv

As we grow, we need to start building an agile team (5-6 team member with their product owner) that can sustain by themselves coupled with verticals (team would be made of 1-2 main dev, 1-2 tester, 1 devops) with main dev/testers/devops having their own horizontal so a minimum standard can be followed, This would allow better focus, ownership, and ease the transition between team. Today, everyone is doing too many things and we really start to lose focus by doing so

⚔Soph

We need good products and people to build them. Marketing is only a problem where there are things in search for a market. We are not entirely there yet. So, let’s focus first in developing strong products.

🚗Boris

I’m biased towards devs and partners; devs deliver software, while partners are the extension which can expand and contract as needed. Product and marketing to help with direction and create a feedback loop on where we should build. Execs help with the big picture but in this space could be often wrong

🐉Jack

I keep hearing from the team that our technology is the greatest on earth... If so, the world needs to hear that same message. You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Sure we can build more tech for tech’s sake but at the end of the day if nobody knows who we are it will be for nothing. Our marketing strategy starts with communications. A communications manager needs to be hired to allow other people down the pipeline to be super effective. Next is an overhaul of our website and retail facing messaging (no more public facing Notion, replace with solid website and packaged message). Next up, a marketing manager that can help plan our roadmap and release strategy. Lastly is the execution of the marketing materials by the content team, the social media team, the website team, etc...

🎥Adrian

I think taking Harmony to the next level will require executive leadership with experience in taking a company to 10-20x ($10B). We should also place a focus on proper marketing led by someone with 8+ years of experience in the field. Finally, we should focus on hiring more developers who can launch our products and features in a timely manner without relying on a small handful who are already under great pressure.

🔭Daniel

I think what we need in order to scale properly is better marketing, internal communications, and products. We have the creative team ready to create quality content, however we need a marketing plan with strong direction. Furthermore, this marketer needs to be experienced with ad space, SEO, IRL events, etc. An internal communications manager would be extremely effective by keeping every department on the same page, thus keeping our initiatives and branding consistent. Additionally, I think we need a well rounded and experienced head hunter, who will be focused on meeting the right projects at conferences, closes deals, and can follow up with projects. With a few hires of the right people, I think we can be in great shape to finish the year strong.

🎬Danny

we are severely understaffed overall, but to my mind we desperately need more engineers.

⛵Hakwan

tech, marketing, and partnerships. we need to focus primarily on tech, but also need to focus on improving our ability to attract, launch, and maintain great products

🎤Matt

Though I do agree that we should hire more employees, I think that a number of those roles can be delegated to full-time fellows and half-time contributors. I also agree that the growing head count could slow us down, and our primary focus should be in our engineering.

💃🏻Essa

Would go heavy on dev but should go hand in hand with product. Partnership spend should be quality of bizdev and not need a ton of people to execute.

🦒Brian

We should double the number of our engineering team. compared with other chains, harmony has less engineers. we need to maintain our technical leadership.

🐯Tom

Tech and marketing should be our hiring focus imo

⚽Abhishek

Agree with Leo about Executives. Our marketing and partnership need the most focus right now.

🛰️Max

⛓️Konstantin

Gheis

💊Sahil

Developers, Developers, Developers

⏳Zi

💻Aaron

⚛Jackie

With respect to everyone and the amazing tech we have, I’m not sure if many members of the team have experience taking a company from 10-100. 1-10? – Absolutely! But in order for the great technologies that have been built to grow into new markets/segments, we need more high-level marketing and scaling experience on the team. If you need an example of where I believe Harmony is at, look at the story of Chobani Yogurt.

📖Devin

Products, Marketing, and Developing are all of the utmost importance if we wish to successfully grow our ecosystem. Hiring the talent & bringing on professionals that will help us excel in these areas is essential if we wish to stand out from other chains.

🐇Rachel

I would like to see some sort of Internal Communications role. Maybe that can be considered under Exec? If we were to hire 20 more full-time permanent core team I would like to see a bulk of the hires/promotions go towards scaling departments we already have. More focus, less hats sort of thing. I know these positions won’t create or fill themselves overnight, or in the next 6 weeks, but having these discussions leads to necessary preparation if this initiative is executed.

🐐Mikey

I will need to familiarize myself more with how Harmony operates for an extended period of time before giving an opinion here. From my outside point of view... Devs. Hoard all the devs before other protocols take them.

🚜Demetre

In a tech race, I think Harmony should focus on building the best tech and products as quickly as possible. I think Harmony would also benefit from a full-time in-house content manager. This person should be a good writer, who can help other people communicate their work better. Marketing needs to make sure a unified voice across all platforms, but it doesn’t necessarily need a large team to do so.

💿Kelly

Strong Devs to build a robust technology foundation. Marketing tells the story (which in turn bring in awareness and users). Products and Partnership accelerates growth. Very important - the story from mission to strategy to marketing has to be flawless, ONE voice, and cohesive. I.e. if we are for “radical social change” but buys BAYC - the story doesn’t quite jive well.

🌟Novell

🦋Amy

I’m not familiar enough with the operations to understand leadership / executive needs, but my view of the ecosystem is that it needs more destinations now, and more marketing as those become available

🤖Eric

how is our ecosystem ready for a users flow? can we seamlessly onboard growing numbers of new users w/o receiving more than 10% bounce rate?

♒Nick

Consider investing this in etherscan / blockscout

🧑‍🍳 Victa

🐙Sergey

📱Tejassvi

Devs are the ones growing the ecosystem, but marketing is what tells to the world what we are doing. I think one can not succeed without the other, and a slight push in parnerships will help as well.

🏔Diego

🏓Xiaopeng

🍩Bruce

🥤Jeremy

🚛Mohamed

🛫Tahir

🎯Hochung

I don’t know which timeframe is considered here with the “20 extra core team members” - but if it’s somewhat short-term (ie. 6-12 months), I’d personally be very cautious and somewhat advise against that tbh. That’s almost doubling the team if I have that right? Having gone through multiple rounds of “fast scaling” on the people front both at Google and in startups, I’ve seen none actually pay off. It’s borderline impossible to find the “right people” that fast, and it inevitably ends up having a generally negative impact on both culture and quality. That aside, if there’s an opp and need to expand the core team, I’d double down on what Harmony does best to stay on top of the tech game (ie. more devs) and complement it with a couple folks who can help best both focus/guide the efforts (ie. product) as well as help communicate/grow the company’s mission, vision and ultimately impact adoption (ie. marketing)

💣Paola

The main engine of all of this is a robust developer community. Let’s double down on our devs, putting them in different product teams, but not take our eyes off the marketing piece: we may be hitting homeruns with devs but all of it needs to translate to a consumer audience.

🍄Darren