Yes! Especially if you know the folks and with respect to helping with documentation and onboarding. I'm technical, but my role in a fairly large, well known open source project was strictly non-technical. Best summed up as: "other". What was interesting is that my role wasn't only product-y in nature (product is my professional calling card). It also included project management, sales (I explain what sales means in the context of open source below), and bd. Ironically, contrary to my advice to you about documentation, I did not focus much of my energies there as an individual contributor, that was already being done already and we worked with customers to improve that. However, onboarding new users is a big challenge for many projects, and I do think the need is there.
Some background: At the time, the project was created and maintained by a very smart technical maestro / team which included a small core team of 1-2 developers. There is/was a large 3rd party ecosystem with shims and plugins into every known framework/language.
This open source framework that I speak of has achieved product / market fit in my view. But like many activities, it was clear that while that value was being created (problem / solution fit, product / market fit), it was hard to make the leap to capturing this value (sustainable business model so it doesn't need to rely on external funding).
My contribution can best be summarized as product management, with heavy emphasis on customer development, standard product management (but less emphasis on product roadmap work, since the technical creator did most of this), lean canvas/ business model work, business plan, working with lawyers, sales and bd work. I relied heavily on my own product / pricing experience and Steve Blank's / Lean Startup approach to figure out some key questions for customer development "get out of the building" type work: e.g. to make this project sustainable on its own accord, is there revenue we can get in the form of support? Because the project has growing traction across the world, I was able to speak with several potential customers who were using the project heavily in their engineering organizations, and learn about their additional problems they have.This then informed the paid "support" solution we proposed. In many cases, customers were satisfied with the free open source version, and we gave them support as well.
One of the most satisfying things was working with early prospects on defining what it meant to "sell an open source product"... the "capture value" part I spoke of above. This had unique challenges because we wanted all deliverables to customers to go back to open source, which we achieved successfully.
Apologies for the long post. tl;dr: yes you can help, especially if you know the folks. I think you're on the right track. If you'd like to learn more details and if I can help you think through any parallels or questions to your own work, feel free to ping me. I'd be happy to help. Email contact is in my profile.
Some background: At the time, the project was created and maintained by a very smart technical maestro / team which included a small core team of 1-2 developers. There is/was a large 3rd party ecosystem with shims and plugins into every known framework/language.
This open source framework that I speak of has achieved product / market fit in my view. But like many activities, it was clear that while that value was being created (problem / solution fit, product / market fit), it was hard to make the leap to capturing this value (sustainable business model so it doesn't need to rely on external funding).
My contribution can best be summarized as product management, with heavy emphasis on customer development, standard product management (but less emphasis on product roadmap work, since the technical creator did most of this), lean canvas/ business model work, business plan, working with lawyers, sales and bd work. I relied heavily on my own product / pricing experience and Steve Blank's / Lean Startup approach to figure out some key questions for customer development "get out of the building" type work: e.g. to make this project sustainable on its own accord, is there revenue we can get in the form of support? Because the project has growing traction across the world, I was able to speak with several potential customers who were using the project heavily in their engineering organizations, and learn about their additional problems they have.This then informed the paid "support" solution we proposed. In many cases, customers were satisfied with the free open source version, and we gave them support as well.
One of the most satisfying things was working with early prospects on defining what it meant to "sell an open source product"... the "capture value" part I spoke of above. This had unique challenges because we wanted all deliverables to customers to go back to open source, which we achieved successfully.
Apologies for the long post. tl;dr: yes you can help, especially if you know the folks. I think you're on the right track. If you'd like to learn more details and if I can help you think through any parallels or questions to your own work, feel free to ping me. I'd be happy to help. Email contact is in my profile.