2025-Q1 reflection: Building a foundation for our new platform and membership model

This is a summary of major progress we made in Q1 of 2025. Its goal is to summarize our major accomplishments and important context before we prioritize for Q2. We hope this gives our community stakeholders a more strategic-level insight into our progress and organizational plans. See our Product Highlights for 2025Q1 for a product-focused review. Please give us feedback for how we can provide more useful information.

Heading into Q1 2025, we had just completed an organizational re-structuring into new functional areas. These were Products and Services, Business Development, and Delivery and Team Enablement. Our support from The Navigation Fund began in January 2025, and we re-organized around the goals defined in that report. Q1 2025 was the first quarterly cycle under this new system.

Our primary Q1 2025 goal was to build a solid organizational foundation that will enable us to iterate on our product and business model in Q2. We successfully completed our reorganization into dedicated Business Development and Product teams, and implemented a new quarterly target-setting process across the organization. There are still some key remaining areas to make progress, and we need to ensure that key KPIs and team responsibilities are solidified quickly in Q2.

Below we’re sharing a brief update about the major achievements across each area of 2i2c, and first thoughts about outcomes to target in Q2 2025.

Delivery and Enablement #

Goal: Develop the operating structure and team skills to efficiently scale our product and service delivery.

Quarterly Objectives

• D01: Re-organize into product-centric team structure. Define new roles, and accountability practices.
• D02: Define at least one KPI across each of 2i2c’s areas and complete 2-3 iterations of measurement.

How we did #

We did a good job of taking our first steps at being more structured and intentional about our team and our goals. Our biggest accomplishment was to significantly improve the Product and Services (P&S) team’s ability to plan and deliver on work. We are now measuring velocity as a P&S team, and this gives us a much better understanding of our capacity and a means of optimizing it.

We were slower than expected in defining our new team structures - particularly within the Business Development (BD) team, but I’m confident that we are now on the right track. The biggest remaining challenge is to refine the relationship between BD and P&S so that we have clear responsibility hand-offs.

We have made progress defining KPIs, but have had uneven success in implementing them across the teams. We defined the BD KPIs later than expected, and as a result we must still operationalize our measurement of those KPIs.

Finally, we were inconsistent in the way that we completed and documented the work above, and did not reliably encode outcomes as a “source of truth” in our team compass. This resulted in some confusion about the status, context, and outcomes of some of the team initiatives.

Product and Services #

Goal: Create a systematic approach to defining our product value and prioritizing development work.

Quarterly Objectives

• P01: The Product Menu of current capabilities already exists. The focus now should be on finalizing the Product and Services MVP, which is linked to goal S01
• P02: Integrate Services into the Product roadmap, prioritizing those needed to enable S01
• P03: We have designed a qualitative survey to benchmark and record customer satisfaction for any newly released product feature. This survey is already in the process of being sent out to customers of the recent Grafana work, and will be sent out to representative customers of subsequent feature releases.

How we did #

We’ve finalized our product roadmap and incorporated service design priorities into this system as well. It now guides both technical and service development which are the two key ways that we deliver value to our communities. This is a key win for the team, because it means we can more systematically decide what to build next in order to deliver value to our communities.

We also collaborated with the BD team to define our menu of options for communities and ensure they are clearly defined and scalable for our team. This involved a lot of extra back-and-forth that wasn’t planned, but was critical to ensure we had alignment between our business model and our team’s ability to deliver.

We ran an experiment at conducting community surveys to establish a baseline customer satisfaction KPI and learn if we are building the right things, but didn’t have the response rates that we needed to be useful. We need to find a way of efficiently creating actionable answers to “are we building the right thing?”.

We also agreed on a general principle of measuring community engagement as a primary KPI, but have not yet operationalized it. This is a key metric to understand whether we’re delivering the value we intend, and whether a community is likely to renew their contract.

Finally, in some cases we have continued to interact with communities in an unscalable way. This is both true for the ways in which we’ve given communities guidance and training, as well as the ways that the P&S team has supported BD in its sales and marketing efforts. It is critical that we build scalable systems for delivering services to all of our member communities to ensure that we deliver value to our entire network of member organizations and not just those we have the strongest connections with. It will also create more scalable channels of communication and relationship-building with communities so that we can support and learn from our entire network.

Business Development #

Goal: Create a structured service menu and improve sales tracking.

Quarterly targets

• S01: Define a tiered pricing and service model
• S02: Define a scalable sales system
• S03: Create and operationalize revenue targets and projections

How we did #

Our BD team built a three-tier membership model that combines monthly fees with active user pricing. This gives us a foundation to iterate on our pricing and business model. Initial anecdotal feedback from renewing communities has been positive, though we have not yet systematized a process for collecting and incorporating feedback from communities into our sales assets.

We’ve completed the first version of our sales CRM to track all customer conversations and tie them to ongoing opportunities. The CRM is now being used reliably, and has already generated helpful feedback for improvement. However we did not make our intended progress in creating systematized and scalable sales assets. It will be critical to build these assets quickly so that we can engage in efficient sales conversations and iterate quickly.

We were slower than expected in defining the KPIs that drive BD. We’ve successfully defined the KPIs that should drive BD, but have not operationalized and iterated on business development targets. It will be critical to measure these BD KPIs and define targets in Q2 in order to set a benchmark of success for BD.

Finally, we were slower than expected in defining the team structure of BD, due to a diffusion of responsibility stemming from our shared leadership model. We’ve clarified that ambiguity and now have a defined structure of roles and responsibilities within BD.

Concluding thoughts #

Overall, I consider this quarter a success, given that we are operating with new systems for planning and executing work, as well as a new team structure. We didn’t accomplish everything we set out to do in Q1 2025, but I think that’s OK for our first quarterly cycle. In Q2 I expect us to be better at scoping the work we aim to accomplish, as well as holding ourselves accountable for getting it done.

In Q2, we need to prioritize the refinement of our Business Development / Membership model and the system we use for growing and sustaining it. Our P&S team is now much more reliable at planning and delivering work, and our next bottleneck is having a business process that can reliably generate work and revenue that sustains the organization. This will be a key focus in our Q2 planning.