Transitioning into Product Management: APM at Koinex
My journey as an associate product manager in a fast moving cryptocurrency and blockchain startup
Coming from a programming background primarily, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous before starting at Koinex as an Associate Product Manager. My first exposure to cryptocurrencies and blockchain was at the beginning of 2017. Koinex was the first name that came to my mind when I decided I wanted to move into Product Management. I began my journey on 23rd July at Koinex and I can say without a doubt that the kind of growth I’ve seen within myself is inimitable.
As soon as I got my offer letter, I received a list of blockchain and cryptocurrency related resources for reading to expand my knowledge in the space. Along with the conventional responsibilities of a product manager, my role also revolves around the duties dedicated to the blockchain space.
Initial month
When I joined, Koinex had just released Loop our peer-to-peer platform allowing users to trade INR for BTC, ETH and XRP. From the first day itself, I was put to work. The team welcomed me like family and the founders counted on me from the get-go. My focus during my first month was to understand our situation better and to get involved with different tasks and initiatives.
At the beginning, my task was how I could improve Loop as a platform. This would involve understanding current user personas, collecting data points to see where the users are facing problems (through our analytics platform, talking directly to the users, support team), coming up with solutions for them and finally adding new functionalities.
During this time, Koinex was approaching its first anniversary (August 25th). Being a very new industry there are no set standards for us to follow on such occasions. Coming off a year full of achieving milestones, we decided to celebrate this with a bang and released a full year in review report. I worked with the Business Development and Marketing team to ideate the strategy behind it. Grasping sense of the market certainly helps a PMs with their work.
But most importantly, during this month I got to know my team very well and as a product manager, I feel it is necessary to have a strong connection and understanding of the team. You realize the strengths and weaknesses of your team only after interacting with them and understanding the person that they are.
Design Thinking
I work very closely with the design team; assisting them in designing wireframes, aligning the designs with the vision of the company, utilizing customer insights and ensuring that the products go beyond the current industry standards. A product manager needs to be able to understand the different kinds of users and empathize with them.
Recognizing my need for more experience and clarity on these, I try to follow different blogs for designing, attend workshops and learn from our design team. It was only over time that I realized that for a product manager, it is important to give designing its own time and to give the designers complete freedom to think of different ideas & come up with numerous prototypes. Creative processes like User Interface and User Experience designing cannot be rushed or curbed.
Blockchain and cryptospace is currently known for not being very user-friendly with multiple security precautions and long onboarding procedures. On top of that, awareness of how blockchain work is still very limited. It’s a very new industry and thus has limited documentation about the products and their workings. UX is believed to be one of the biggest challenges blockchain is currently facing, along with its scalability. Hence, it’s on the design team of Koinex to make the UX simpler and to relay to the users’ information in such a manner that whether it is a new or an old user, their experience of our diverse products is great. For the same, we stay in touch with the latest global trends and developments in UX surrounding blockchain and particularly DApps (Decentralized Applications) through various videos, medium blogs and using the latest products in the market.
Project Management
As any product manager would affirm, the most integral part of our job is managing the product while you coordinate with the various departments. My biggest takeaway from this has been the realization of how communication plays a big role in product management.
It starts with making a Product Requirement Document (PRD) for the product after discussions with various stakeholders. These generally involve discussions with various stakeholders at different levels and a lot of research. The PRDs need to be descriptive enough, ensuring that no confusion is there for the designers in understanding the product’s offerings or for the developers when they start designing the architecture and finally write the code. It may sound like a cumbersome thing to do but I personally enjoy it a lot and when I start writing the requirements and use cases in detail, I do come across details which we may have initially overlooked. I do believe I have improved in this regard but there is a scope for improvement in the PRDs I write. The important part is to take as much feedback as possible from different domains and to keep the PRDs updated.
After this, my work involves working with the design team for the wireframes and the prototypes, planning the development process, the timelines and the sprints with the CTO and Tech leads, holding daily standups and ensuring that the team is able to give their 100%. Monitoring the progress of the different verticals and ensuring that the products are on track is also the product team’s responsibility. The role comes with a lot of hard work, pressure and responsibilities, it does take a while getting used to it.
Blockchain Research
Koinex’s long term plans go far beyond our current cryptocurrency exchange. Our Blockchain R&D team of which I’m a part of comes up with different use cases where Blockchain is the perfect fit and we ideate on how we can build products for the same. Our work also involves studying the latest technology developments (even beyond blockchain), following events like Devcon 4 and to see how the upcoming upgrades can change the industry. We also hold weekly brown-bag sessions where we explain blockchain fundamentals and developments to our engineering, design, business and marketing teams thus expanding the team’s knowledge about the domain and giving them a holistic view.
Be it a new protocol like ERC-1400 or ERC-948, layer 1 blockchain upgrades like Sharding and Proof-of-Stake, layer 2 blockchain upgrades like Side chains or even the latest happenings in the world of private blockchains; having a good understanding of the blockchain world does influence our scope and long term vision to a large extent.
Marketing
As I understand the products and their current status completely, I’m involved with pre and post-launch marketing of the products to ensure the success of the product and to judge the result of the team’s efforts. For the products we develop and the events we hold, I’m involved in the preparation of our marketing strategies with our marketing team and to a limited extent in their execution.
There is also a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about blockchain and cryptocurrencies especially due to the lack of regulations. Traditional marketing channels like Facebook Ads, Google AdWords etc are off limits to cryptocurrency exchanges. Which is why we have to be out of the box with our marketing approach whether it be through different contests, social media activities, offline events, conferences or even through venturing into completely new avenues.
Analyzing Data
Judging the KPIs of any new feature or release and understanding where it’s failing or is hitting the mark is all about data analytics at the end of the day. A big part of my day to day tasks is analyzing data and later making decisions based on it. You need to trust data over any sort of gut feeling you may have. This is something I’m still working upon and realize that it takes time.
Product Presentations
Product demonstrations is a key and enjoyable aspect of a product manager’s job. It comes down to explaining the various use cases, scenarios and features of the product to the different teams you work alongside with, and presenting the product to various users. I’ve also had the pleasure of being given the opportunity to present the products we work upon here at Koinex at various public events. One such occasion was Koffee with Koinex, which was our first Meetup. I’m grateful for this as my exposure to public speaking had been very limited before. Interacting directly with different stakeholders and creating more awareness about blockchain, in general, was something I enjoyed a lot.
Hiring
Hiring may not be the something that comes to a person’s mind when they think of a product manager’s responsibilities but it’s importance definitely cannot be understated. For every fast-growing startup in the world, hiring is always an issue. Especially for one with high expectations from its team like Koinex. To build great products you need great teams. Team building is an area requiring contributions from a product manager at various levels. As a product manager, I need to align our scope with our resources, identify where we are facing a bandwidth crunch and help in hiring for the same whether it be by removing bottlenecks in our hiring process or through shortlisting/conducting interviews.
Misc Tasks
According to the domain, a product manager’s role involves various miscellaneous tasks. Some of them in my case are: following the cryptocurrency market’s movements, looking out & preparing for prominent main net releases, hardforks and airdrops, studying the competitors to our exchange business, being informed about latest regulatory processes globally, solving prominent support cases and educating the masses about how blockchains work.
Looking forward
In the past 6 months at Koinex, I have learned far more than what I thought I would. Being in the Blockchain space has presented more challenges on top of what an APM would normally face, as one would expect from a technology still in its nascent stages. 2019 is primed to be a big year for blockchain and cryptocurrencies with a lot of respected projects like Ethereum and Ziliqa going live with the work they’ve been doing for the past couple of years. If the current limitations of blockchain are overcome or not is something I’m eagerly waiting to see and work on. I’m a firm believer of blockchain technology and hope to do more to support the revolution of Web 3.0.
A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.
– Deep Nishar
