A few things I’ve taken away from this one.
The biggest thing for me is how much my own proposal grew and shifted from what was originally written down. The docs work in particular needed way more back-and-forth with the community/tech-specialists than I’d budgeted for. Writing copy that speaks for everyone in Arrow turned out to be genuinely hard, and I underestimated how much of the project that would end up being.
I also ended up working all three milestones in parallel rather than sequentially, which was bad planning on my side, although honestly I’m not sure it was fully avoidable given how the pieces leaned on each other. Either way, it’s a big part of why the timeline slipped.
What’s been on my mind more than any of that, though, is whether hard deadlines are the right primary rail for projects this size. If a contributor ends up three months past their expiry, the DAO is in an awkward spot: pay for work that’s outside the window, or walk away from work that’s already been done. Neither feels great, and I think there’s a cleaner way.
Roughly: break grants of this size into smaller sprint-sized deliverables, each scoped to a single PR (or equivalent). Have the acceptance criteria for each one written into the proposal itself, tied to something visible. Funds unlock per-PR as each lands, rather than against one end-date (maybe something v2 tokenomics could even automate). And a mandatory check-in every week or two, via PR, for the life of the grant. In the age of AI this is more important then ever, since even though amazing things can be produced quickly, it can come with an amazing amount of slop that can be hard to review. Smaller chunks makes this manageable for both the contributor and the reviewer. Also, they give more contribution/collaborations opportunities for other contributors because the work is live, fresh and interactive.
If work is completed this way, nobody’s holding a big lump sum against a slipping deadline, and if the work starts drifting from the proposal it gets caught early rather than at expiry.
These come from someone who learned them the hard way on this project, for what that’s worth. They’re the things I’d have wanted to know going in, and I hope they’re useful as we keep working out better guardrails for grants and bounties. 