Blockchain Product Managers Wanted!
The new gold rush is here and its called Blockchain. Wildly overvalued companies popping up every day, and most without a full-fledged product concept. While the blockchain community is busy building out the protocol layers, platform, and infrastructure, people seem unaware that outside of the ICOs that there is too strong of a focus on the technology and not enough on the user experience (UX), design, business viability and core product offering.
Salaries for blockchain developers are at an all-time high. There is a critical mass of developers switching gears from traditional app development to blockchain, but there’s not a flux of blockchain product management hitting the scene. This is shocking as there are massive learning curves in writing new coding languages but not so on the product side.
I have said for a longtime “A good product person should be knowledgeable on everything and an expert at nothing”. The same applies to product managers when it comes to the blockchain. If you have experience being a product manager in another field then blockchain companies can only benefit… even if your focus is to simply get a new token listed.
The barriers of understanding blockchain aren’t as steep for good product managers as it is for developers to start using the technology and to prototype. Explaining deeper challenges of what trust means for blockchain, design and user adoption are the key problems for a product person to tackle.
Introducing product focus to blockchain teams can only help developers to build in days and not months by thinking about users and product strategy from the outset. This can only happen once founding teams of new blockchain startups take a look beyond raising money for tokens and releasing whitepapers.
Even if you’re just selling a coin, in the end, it’s about user adoption.
Yes, the blockchain world is founded by libertarians-cypherpunks, but product managers can even understand and target these users.
Blockchain technologies are now in a volatile cycle of fundraising seemingly kitsch, unlikely or unviable start-ups. If you’re a founder of or an investor in one of these companies, look beyond the hype there are two very important questions to consider:
- Why blockchain?
- How and why will users adopt this product?
