adam

Adam learned about ProductCamp while living in Portland, Oregon and was lucky enough to find a group of like-minded people that shared his interests in building products and helping others become better at building products.

January 17, 2018
6:13 am

Blockchain and the Product Manager

Introduction

Recently I worked with a talented team to create a blockchain real estate application. The project allowed tokens to be traded and property titles to be transferred between users on the Ethereum blockchain*. It was meant to be as realistic as a proof of concept can be, so the team included designers, front/back end developers, QA and me in the role of PM (product manager). It was deployed onto Amazon infrastructure and demoed live in front of dozens of executives from across Dallas in 2017.

The purpose of this post is to give some concise, practical tips for working with real projects and real investors on a blockchain project in 2018. If you would like a brief introduction into blockchain I will list some references at the end of this post (I define brief as consumable in under a lunch break.

*The choice of words here is not 100% technically accurate but used to help with readability – for example using the word ‘address’ to mean a blockchain address when we are quickly introducing a real estate application just seemed cruel. I also excluded edge cases when discussing how blockchain works – much like excluding very real but unnecessary edge cases when giving an overview of how internet protocols work.

Three Special Considerations

So you’ve found a project to work on? Congrats! Here are my top three takeaways for your experience, above and beyond the typical technology considerations when delivering a product.

Lesson 1: Tooling will change under your feet. If you work in a technology PM role you already have some exposure, but the pace and magnitude of change in blockchain is staggering. Any course or book over a couple months old has strong chances of referencing or relying on information that is no longer current. This can also be hard for a technical PM as the underlying technology (the Solidity language, RPC, geth, etc. for my project) is custom-built for the specific platform. Imagine if Chrome failed every week because an underlying dependencies or tools stopped being supported.

Strategy: Get your hands dirty. In my case I paid for a Udemy class to understand the basics. Now you can find many free (or freemium) models. Just make sure it is constantly kept up to date, or when you download the tools you will fail when you try to follow their directions. It took me about 40 hours to have any hope of knowing how Solidity worked – but I’m slow. Once you are armed with some level of understanding of how things work technically, bear in mind that things will continue to change and that the task of writing clean, secure code is not easy. Help the team by keeping your estimates reasonable. Also, find a resource that will keep you up to date on the next tooling/devops/code updates. They are still coming.

Lesson 2: Teaching is your #1 task. A typical PM skill is to take requirements, problems, complaints, testimonials – all internal and external feedback – and distill that down into a roadmap that makes financial and product sense. Now imagine you work for Amazon, but when you explain how people can buy CDs online they stop you because they’re not familiar with the internet (non-technical awareness of the http protocol in this example). Much like the mid to late 1990s, the current state of blockchain has a wide range of knowledge and gaps. Spend any time in this area and you will find people who think blockchain can cure all forms of technical and societal problems, people who think it is a bubble waiting to pop, and all forms in between. As a PM of any kind of B2B or B2C product you will have to explain more than how your app works – you will have to speak a couple levels in each direction so people can grasp the broader context in a range of technical capacities.
Strategy: Contacting your personas is not good enough. Neither is educating them. You will need to work pull out your best PM skills (conjure up your Marty Cagan or Bob Dorf or Daniel Zacarias) and really go straight to the pain or motivator. Above all, do not lead with what blockchain can do. Lead with what problems they currently have. In the example of the title transfer project, the problems relate to disintermediation, costs, and ownership of data. The concept of a blockchain solution never came into the conversation with the stakeholders until after the prototype solution had been discussed internally. Remember: 99.9% of problems can be solved with a non-blockchain solution.

Lesson 3: Your Code is immutable. A foundational tenet of blockchain technologies is that the data on a blockchain is distributed and permanent. This is great for all of the decentralized, trust-related reasons you might want to use blockchain for your next project. This can be terrifying for a project. At times it can feel like broadcasting your product sketches onto the side of a building during rush hour. Did I mention that some failure modes effectively print money? Or that some of the smartest minds didn’t catch loopholes that allowed anonymous users to steal millions of dollars? That should keep you up at night.

Strategy: There are several here. I’ll bullet them out for convenience.

If you’re not an extremely technical PM (read: you can produce code by yourself) you need to get a technical lead. You cannot rely on gut instincts here.
Most contract-style languages understand the problem and provide capabilites to test things locally – so for Ethereum the “localhost” equivalent is TestRPC, which can spin up a completely private and free ethereum-style blockchain on your personal machine.
Allow for time. Your team should already have a good idea of how to write smart code, dating back to OOP concepts (methods are singular in focus, classes are constrained to one focus area, etc.) – this goes x100 for writing contracts on a blockchain.
Use a QA. Do you know a QA who has reviewed Ethereum? Unlikely. Do you know a QA who thinks critically and can anticipate technical problems? Hopefully. Call that person.

Where does a PM fit into this landscape?

So hopefully you have an idea of how a blockchain technology works – don’t worry if you don’t know the nuances between proof of work vs proof of stake. An important first question for you, our product-minded reader – what type(s) of projects/platforms/products are more likely to even need a product manager? This is very hard to generalize, but I’ll try to do so anyway with some traits:

More likely to need a PM:

Funded companies (did an ICO just happen?) – they (hopefully) need to produce some specific work and can use internal help organizing and external work communicating with stakeholders
Companies built on a longer/deeper problem. By now you have an idea of what blockchain is good for (and what it’s not). Some problems are only effectively solved using blockchain. Think Amazon 1998 – could you see the problem and the solution as well as Jeff Bezos? Me neither, but I’m more trained to think in those terms now.

Less likely to need a PM:

Middleware or protocols (think heavy development) – these are typically open source projects and are really building blocks for companies. Gollum is an example of a protocol built on Ethereum – it is more likely that a B2C company using Gollum would need a PM than Gollum directly.
Companies that just received funding. Wait – you had that in the other list: what gives? Hopefully this helps explain how wild this technology is – you will find the best and worst intentions when you start digging. So dig – dig into their Github history, their whitepaper, their distribution of tokens. It does not take long to see if a group wants to solve a problem or simply wants to make some money.

Bonus: Where Do I Find a Job (or Experience) in Blockchain?

Did you make it this far? Are you terrified or energized? If you are interested in getting more direct experience I will list a few of my resources here.

Technical PM: step one is to get up to speed on specific tech and start contributing. In the Ethereum example an experienced Node developer can pick up Solidity concepts pretty quickly. You should also have no trouble finding any number of projects on Github that could use some help. I would suggest you find a non-paying (or partially paying) gig under a time constraint to see if doing this as a fulltime job is up your alley.

Non-technical PM – step one is find a project you enjoy and see how you can help. There are over 1000 blockchain protocols (or derivatives) out there. Most of them are a set of highly technical open source developers. In my experience these developers have a hugh host of strengths: planning out work in the medium and long term is not of interest (if I’m painting in broad strokes). Possible entry points include being a project or product manager, scrum master or similar. A typical gap is also related to marketing (see #2 above) – so finding a niche as product marketing manager is a great entry point. While there is a lot of movement (financial and otherwise) into this area, conversations are still key.

Conclusion

You do not have to look hard to find hyperbole in almost every area of blockchain, from the market capitalizations to the society effects to the technological gains. If you have interest in seeing if this is for you, as a product manager, you have a lot of options. There are certainly a few areas to be on the lookout as you start, but you can be ready for them and be successful if you are ready to put in the work. Is 2018 the year that you jump into a blockchain project?

By Adam Rose, Product Manager at Modern Message