Intentions on Display: The Art of Being Purposeful in the Metaverse Pt. II

Apply these practices to be more intentional in your Metaverse efforts.

In pt. I, we discussed why you should prioritize being intentional in your Metaverse work. If you have made it this far, maybe you want to be more intentional in your Metaverse efforts. We can do so by drawing on a few product management basics (and a lot of practice).

The thing is, history will not be kind to those who operate with poor intentions. Technology will catch up with those who have committed atrocities such as the secret celebrity NFT rug pulls and muddling of Metaverse definitions for personal gain. Being intentional is more important now than ever, and it’s not too late to improve your processes.

Your mission and vision are the cornerstones of intent.

A vision is a statement that describes your long-term aspirations and goals. It sets a clear picture of the future state that the team wants to achieve and is used to inspire and motivate employees, customers, and stakeholders. A company vision is often aspirational and idealistic and provides a sense of purpose and direction for the company's future growth.

A company mission, on the other hand, is a statement that defines the company's overall purpose and reason for existence. It describes what the company does and when paired with a vision why it does it. This sets the direction for the company's strategy and decision-making. A company mission is more focused on the present and provides a practical and actionable framework for the company's operations.

A company vision provides a long-term view of the future state that the company wants to achieve, while a company mission provides a statement of the company's overall purpose and reason for existence. Both a company vision and a company mission are important for providing guidance and direction for a company and its employees.

Before you build, establish your foundation.

This concept of why then what/how can be applied at almost any level. You can set a statement of intent for your personal goals, a grand vision for your company, and everything in between. Basically, your vision is the future state you believe needs to exist, and your mission is the top-level strategy for how you will make progress toward your vision.

This pattern repeats at the goal-setting level (OKRs), and beyond. What do you want to achieve, and how will we track progress? Objectives, themes, problem statements, Epics, Stories, and Subtasks. Why are you taking that action? Who is it for? What do you need to accomplish?

If you aren’t reflecting regularly, how are you iterating with intent?

In software, many of us (try to) practice Agile. Scrum is an agile framework that helps establish processes for iteration. An agile sprint retrospective is a meeting that is held at the end of an Agile sprint to review and reflect on the sprint's progress and identify areas for improvement. It is a key element of the Agile software development methodology, which emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement. If you are to only have one agile ceremony, retrospective (“retro”) is the most important one.

During a sprint retrospective, the team members gather to discuss the sprint's successes, challenges, and areas for improvement. They may use various techniques, such as brainstorming, root cause analysis, and discussion, to identify ways to improve the process and enhance the team's performance in future sprints. A “sprint” is an interval of time. Most commonly a sprint is 2 or 3 weeks, but there are 1-week sprints and others. From my experience, most teams operate in 2-week sprints.

The purpose of a sprint retrospective is to foster a culture of continuous improvement, by encouraging team members to reflect on their work, identify areas for improvement, and make changes that will help them work more effectively and efficiently. By doing so, the team can continuously improve their performance and deliver better results in each subsequent sprint.

In short, an Agile sprint retrospective is a meeting held at the end of an Agile sprint to review and reflect on the sprint's progress and identify areas for improvement. It helps teams to continuously improve their performance and deliver better results in each subsequent sprint.

We don’t know what we don’t know

If your team has a shared vision, a colloquial understanding of what needs to be accomplished, and a routine honest check-in, then congratulations you have what it takes to be more intentional. Being strategic, really and truly strategic, requires frameworks for handling known unknowns.

We cannot predict everything that will ever come up. We must rely on our experts to fill in gaps based on their own experience. Discuss the trade-offs of one expert’s suggestion versus another. Seek alignment through conversation, and make sure you are doing things for the right reason. Set a repeating interval to talk about what is working, what is not working, and what you can try differently to get closer to your vision.

Product Marketing = Value Marketing

When you are marketing your product or service, you are promoting the value created by your product or service. What is the actual value? If you are promoting a “community,” that doesn’t exist yet, people will notice. If you are promoting “the first Metaverse platform to do ____” and haven’t written any code, people will notice. If you start a new standards body consisting of multiple companies in the same investors’ portfolio, people will notice. Don’t just wing it - make sure that the value you are marketing inspires and aligns your builders, users, and stakeholders by including them in these retrospectives.

Being intentional is a core value of OMI. Every decision we make can be accounted for. It can be tempting to go for the low-hanging fruits that come with confusion, username lockdowns, and grand Metaverse definition. Of course, we want to be thought leaders in the Metaverse, but we are a community of Metaverse builders… so who would we be fooling with Metaverse definition of clickbait?

If we attacked other standards bodies and fought to be the one true standards body, we would fail to promote our value - which is contingent upon working together. If we issued an NFT for “active members,” we would push away the community members who are blockchain-averse. If we rolled out a roadmap for the Metaverse, we would be pre-defining the work that needs to be done. We are a collective, not a platform, so it doesn’t make sense for us to predefine the work that needs to be done. We instead, focus on our flexible framework and regularly look inward at our efforts to see how we can improve. We bucketize the type of efforts, and anyone can propose, refine, or implement what we discover together.

Conclusion

If you are leading a Metaverse startup, tool, or community, please be authentic. You can not fool Metaverse builders, you can only fool Metaverse rookies. If your intent is to get as many Twitter followers as possible, then you may want to do whatever it takes to drive more followers your way. But if you want to build the Metaverse, think about how your actions are helping others beyond your own ambitions. Again, the Metaverse is watching.

Thanks for reading this far! I am still getting comfortable writing and creating these videos. Sometimes I make mistakes, but I am learning! This article has attempted to promote how you can be more intentional in your Metaverse efforts.

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