Hi, my name is Brian Truax. A month ago I stepped into a new role with Informal Systems as the Business Operations Manager for the Hub Team, working alongside Jehan Tremback, Marius Poke and the rest of the team to support strategic operations.
I’ve been around Cosmos since 2021. I was previously COO & Head of Product at LOA Labs, working with organizations like Regen Network, Althea, Hedera, and several others on product strategy, go to market planning, and operational support for founders. LOA Labs also validated for nine Cosmos chains including the Hub.
What I’d like to accomplish with this post:
- Introduce myself to the Hub Forum community - hey there
- Give an overview of my role for community, since you’ll likely see and hear from me more around the Cosmos
- Make a call for other product-manager types in Cosmos to asynchronously explore some particular problem spaces in their own areas of the Cosmos, particularly:
- How might we better collaborate on the Cosmos Hub roadmap?
- How might we better bridge technical and non-technical audiences, which likely prevents a good deal of community participation and collaboration on feature ideas that will drive value for the ecosystem?
- How might we increase synergy between marketing minds and major product releasers, so that we continue to build bullish sentiment around Cosmos?
- How might we create better feedback loops between teams funded to work on the Hub and community?
- Which product development frameworks have been used by different organizations in Cosmos, and which have been winning? For instance, I’d be interested to explore a robust JTBD framework to guide prioritization of features for different audience on the Hub, hoping to reduce their pursuit of alternative chains and ecosystems.
A bit more about me
Prior to going full-time in Cosmos, I’ve held leadership roles in organizations from 10 - 10,000 employees, across several industries, from early stage startups (some of them my own) to 165-year-old academic institutions. My exposure to blockchain and crypto starts in 2017, running BTC and ETH miners. I shut those down after the Black Summer fires that killed 1B animals in Australia in late 2019 - early 2020. I couldn’t justify PoW’s real impact to the environment at the time. There’s been a lot of innovation regarding miner energy usage since then, but I’d still like to see every chain be carbon neutral. I spent the next few years exploring DLT use cases for climate action outside of my full-time roles in web2. This led me to Regen Network, which led me to LOA Labs, which led me to the broader Cosmos ecosystem, which led me to Informal Systems.
I’ve not participated in the Hub Forum prior to this but have been a lurker for years.
My role at Informal
As the Business Operations Manager for the Hub team, I’m primarily responsible for overseeing the operations of the Hub team, ensuring smooth coordination of both internal and external communications, and collaborating on our go-to-market campaigns. This involves fostering better relationships with external partners, stakeholders, and other organizations, hoping to build stronger collaborations. On a day-to-day basis, I’ll also be supporting product development, engineering, and developer relations from a product management perspective. I intend to be seeking out areas for process improvement, devising and implementing solutions to enhance efficiency within our team. Resource management is another significant part of my role, ensuring resources are allocated effectively to support our operations within budget constraints.
A call to action for other product manager-types in Cosmos
First of all, the Cosmos stack is amazing. Our ecosystem has been and continues to be built by brilliant people who all have fantastic ideas. But clear issues we face are:
- we struggle to collectively decide a direction and priority
feedback loops between community and builders are nascent or completely missing - a shared understanding of maintenance responsibilities across the entire stack is not there
- technical debt is massive
- collaboration amongst organizations is inconsistent and the relationships are tense at times
I don’t have the answers or a magic wand to solve these issues. And I’m not here to be the peppy new guy on the scene who says “let’s create another new process that no one will follow”.
I’m here to listen and collaborate, continually delivering good work alongside the rest of you. If you feel like you could contribute to solving or exploring some of the problem spaces above hit me up. Let’s chat.
Reach out to me any time:
Telegram: briantruax
Twitter: @btruax