That points to the problem of open source: a hostility towards growth and product as critical team roles. It makes sense - OSS is an opportunity to do great engineering without constraints of a workplace. But without prioritizing product, growth, and design, OSS consumer products stagnate and suck as an end user.
Shifting from GitHub Issues as the default project management is a good prime candidate for starting to move the needle. Public-facing Clubhouse-the-project-management-app would be easier for non-eng contributions, holding open OKR processes, and having some clear ways for non developers to contribute.
Fwiw I tried to help on growth / product on one consumer OSS product I love- there just wasn’t a mechanism for someone to say yes, and there was a need for centralization to do some of the obvious next practices any startup would do. It’s easy for engineers to contribute, but ambient hostility and concern about marketing / growth / product tactics make it tough to turn rock solid OSS technology into competitive OSS products.
Suppose you had met the original author at the very beginning of the project and convinced them that marketing/growth/etc. is important. Let's suppose they only write some single facile sentence in the README about, "marketers/growth experts welcome" in response.
I would hold that just having that single, facile sentence buried in the README from the outset is more powerful and persuasive to the project's developer base than the most detailed proposal that a marketing/growth expert could possibly write after the fact.
Maybe another way to say this: if you showed up to a consumer OSS product that had this facile sentence in it there, the entire developer base would welcome you make a marketing pitch to them. Without it, they would interpret it as noise.
Shifting from GitHub Issues as the default project management is a good prime candidate for starting to move the needle. Public-facing Clubhouse-the-project-management-app would be easier for non-eng contributions, holding open OKR processes, and having some clear ways for non developers to contribute.
Fwiw I tried to help on growth / product on one consumer OSS product I love- there just wasn’t a mechanism for someone to say yes, and there was a need for centralization to do some of the obvious next practices any startup would do. It’s easy for engineers to contribute, but ambient hostility and concern about marketing / growth / product tactics make it tough to turn rock solid OSS technology into competitive OSS products.