Weekly interview. Today Product manager — Alexander Goncharenko.
Cryptoindex is a tool for exposure to the cryptomarket and serves as a smart benchmark for all cryptocurrencies. The AI-based Cryptoindex algorithm is continuously analyzing more than 1800 coins applying over 200 factors, processing more than 1 million signals per second to provide a highly sophisticated index of the top 100 coins.
We would like to introduce our Product Manager Alexander Goncharenko!
He has over 5 years’ experience in project and product management. Alex is a Blockchain enthusiast and has spent over 3 years developing trading software.
Here is a quick interview with Alexander. We prepared several questions from our community.
- Hi Alexander! Can you tell our community something about your background? How did you find yourself in product management?
Here is my story: I have a degree in oil engineering, I used to work in this area, but did not want to continue for a number of reasons. In parallel with my studies at the institute, and since I was at school, I was interested in IT and web design, although only as a hobby. ut the moment came when I decided to transform my hobby into a job. I started working in an e-learning startup related to online learning procurement rules for new federal laws that were adopted in the territory of the Russian Federation. In this startup, I combined the functions of the project manager and product manager in the general “jack of all trades”. I managed the design of UX, experimented with the form of presenting educational material inside of the product, was engaged in Customer Development, advised partners on technical issues, led product analytics, planned development. At the same time, I was taught public procurement discourse by one of the top experts in this field in Russia, that is, the amount of experience, knowledge, and skills received per unit of time was enormous.
The project was eventually taken to the break-even point, cash flow was established — the business became self-sustainable, and the developed product pleased the stakeholders with its metrics.
And at the fall of 2013, I became acquainted with such concepts as Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, as well as the blockchain technology underlying. I was very inspired by the disruptive and libertarian spirit of these concepts, their potential influence on the technological process of humanity as a whole. After a thorough acquaintance and reading of the manifestos, I attempted to buy the first bitcoin (it was worth <200 USD) on MT.GOX, right before the first price increase to 1200 dollars. Everyone knows what happened as a result of the MT.GOX exchange and my funds with it …
At the same time, I started reading books about trading and programming and began trying to code my own trading bots. My skill grew, involvement in technology grew, I thought a lot about the areas of application and possible products, then the first ASICs from bitmain came. Even then, I began to think about cryptocurrency indices as tools that mitigate this crazy volatility.
Then came the explosive growth of the crypto market in spring 2017, when the blockchain and cryptocurrency technology attracted millions of people to the industry. And this was the time when my experience in this area became super useful …
- Do you enjoy working in teams? What is the best quality a product manager can have?
There is nothing more evolving and fascinating, but at the same time complex and specific, than working in a cross-functional team. Each one has its own field of expertise to learn and get experience from.
As for the quality of the product manager I can say that his main goal is to figure out how the product should look now and in a few years, and then broadcast this vision to the team.
Before the existence of product management, the relationship between business (or customer) and development team (or design department) used to look like a cat-dog relationship.
The task of the product manager is to make the product cool and not to distract the developer, by setting tasks correctly, distributing time and denoting priorities. Otherwise, there will be few features and many unfixed bugs.
Designers should be looked after too. But sometimes creative work or the desire to do “like this” to bypass the user story, user-friendly interface or task facing the banner outweighs. To prevent this from happening, the product manager has to understand what, how and why it happens. Why and how you can do, where you need creativity, and where it is still at the head of the corner — the user or marketing goals.
Once you consolidate all the main qualities of the product manager, you get this list:
- Know the market.
- Know your competitors.
- Understand marketing strategy and know how to improve the product to make it easier to sell.
- Be able to increase the value of the product, present it to investors and promote it in the name of a common goal, as well as know how to monetize the product and without burning through.
- Know how to set tasks for developers, designers, etc., how to prevent them from going into the wilds, but, in the end, to achieve the goal.
- See further than his nose.
- Analyze the effectiveness of deployments, patches, and improvements.
- Manage your team and live with project.
And the most important thing that I enjoy is participation in the modeling of the product at zero point, thinking through its present time and future and the most important embodiment of this future into reality.
- Tell us about the most difficult situation that you’ve had to deal with in previous jobs. How did you manage the issue?
The most important thing here is the prioritization of features and tasks. Putting wrong priorities when launching a new product on the market can bring to the release date a product that does not carry much value for the user, or has less or worse functionality than its competitors, thereby turning away potential users whose trust is not so easy to win.
A short example case:
INTRO
A no-name financial company developed a retail product for investing in classic financial instruments based on the philosophy of turning the whole process into 2 clicks. The priority was given to the development of the desktop version, the competitors had only mobile MVP with an average UX and mediocre set of functionality. The competitor has designated minimum functionality, that is it was impossible to show less.
OUTRO
Bottom line: the metrics of the desktop version did not satisfy the stakeholders, the mobile version of the product will have been ready for release only in a nquarter, the marketing budget showed a negative ROI, the overall budget of the project was exhausted, the mobile application of competitors dominated the market. Curtain falls. The project is closed.
I will also add an important point — it is difficult to infect team members to live with project just as you yourself do. Stressful work sometimes happens to be tremendous, people often break away from stress — here diplomacy comes to the rescue. Diplomacy and the ability to listen are very important.
- Could you tell us about your Cryptoindex platform? How can our community benefit from it?
Сryptoindex platform will be a single window to everything that happens on the cryptocurrency market. This window will serve as a dashboard for each coin in which information about decision-making factors will be reflected, a trade monitor for a single coin (all orderbooks and trades) + a news line, mentions in Social media.
My favorite feature on the platform is a feature with a summary list of coins with the greatest trading opportunities and an indication of why the algorithm thinks so.
I can not fail to mention such a feature as the prediction of the market situation by Zorax algorithm.
There is also a set of secret features, in general, rest assured — we are preparing a super product for community.
- How do you decide what new features to develop?
It’s perfect, when decisions are made on the basis of data, data-driven decisions, as I mentioned. That is, the data analytics should precede the decision to develop the functionality.
Further, the methodology of prioritizing the development backlog called RICE comes to rescue.
RICE is a method of prioritizing ideas and features of a product. The abbreviation includes 4 factors that can be safely used to assess and prioritize product features:
Reach is coverage
Impact — Impact
Confidence — confidence in your assessment of coverage, impact and labor.
Effort — labor costs
- How do you test new features? What do you think is the best practice?
Zero point is to write initially normal, neat and scalable code according to initially correct architecture.
But everyone who faced software development in practice not in theory, knows that bugs are everywhere.
The first stage of testing begins in the test circuit along with the developers. To do this, we form a focus group and invite in beta testing, collect reports, then fix obvious bugs. Focus group tests everything in different conditions, whether everything works correctly.
After the completion of internal testing, we transfer to production circuit and the collection of bug reports begins from users. Bugreports are examined, it turns out the conditions under which they arose, how to reproduce these bugs. Sometimes bugs occur alone on the side of the user.
What do you think about Cryptoindex? How does it compare with other ICO projects?
Firstly, the crypto index ICO is a rather special phenomenon — we already have a working and finished product. Secondly, it is difficult to find a more expert team in their field. Thirdly, the product and the direction are quite unique, which gives a huge market advantage, because none of even similar subjects have anything in common with it. Working product, for example.
The CIX100 token itself will be a very attractive tool as an expression of the entire market in 1 token. As for the ICO procedure itself, we are very experienced in this part, we know about all the pitfalls.
- What do you think Cryptoindex’s future will be? When to the moon?
Cryptocurrencies are already here, they came into our lives and a tool that expresses 100 coins in one, just had to be created. The platform will be a unique product, an action plan and a development plan are painted for years to come. When is the moon?
I do not know, I can only guess… But maybe Zorax knows when …
Thank you for your time! It was a pleasure to talk to you.
If you have any questions for our team in next weeks interview session please write to roma@cryptoindex.io Note! Your question should be constructive.
The AI-based Cryptoindex algorithm is constantly learning by consuming huge amounts of data rapidly making decisions and choices that humans would struggle to match.
You can always check the current Cryptoindex concept on our MVP platform:http://cryptoindex.ai/
Stay updated on our channels:
Follow CRYPTOINDEX on Telegram
Follow CRYPTOINDEX on Medium
Follow CRYPTOINDEX on Twitter
Follow CRYPTOINDEX on Facebook
Follow CRYPTOINDEX on Linkedin
Follow CRYPTOINDEX on Reddit
