 Hey everybody, I'm Justin Blumenthal, a current product manager at Coinbase. I'm really excited to be here today with you to discuss what it's like to be a PM in the Web3 industry. There's a lot to cover over the next 30 minutes, so let's dive in to today's program. Today we're going to be covering four main themes, and the first I'll give a quick introduction a bit more about myself. Then I'd love to dive into exactly what Web3 PMs do on a daily basis and how they think about architecting their product strategy. I'll then next share a few key principles that I personally find crucial to being an effective PM. And then lastly, I'll share a few thoughts around some exciting themes that I think PMs should pay attention to as they develop Web3 products into the future. So without any further ado, let's dive in. A quick disclaimer that the content in this deck is only my personal view and does not reflect the position of my current or former employers. This presentation is only for informational purposes. And now, a bit about myself. I'm Justin Blumenthal. I'm a PM at Coinbase. I've been there for about two and a half years. I'm based in New York City, and I've had the pleasure of helping to spearhead a few of the products at Coinbase, including our peer-to-peer payments product, our Coinbase card, and some infrastructure products as well, too. Before Coinbase, I was a lead PM at Square for our Square Readers portfolio, and I started my career on Wall Street. I fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2017, and I really haven't looked back since. And that's a bit about me, but I'd also love before we dive into today's agenda to quickly introduce Coinbase for those who are not familiar with the company. So what's Coinbase? Well, Coinbase can be thought of as the front door to crypto. We really pride ourselves on being the safest and easiest to use exchange. Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world, and our strategy is three prongs to think of crypto as an investment, as a new financial system, and as an app platform. We are a multi-product company with 30-plus products for individuals, institutions, and developers all around the world, and we're truly a company that operates at scale. We have currently over $130 billion of assets on platform in 100-plus countries around the world. So with that in mind, I'd now like to jump into the next agenda item for today, which is to discuss in a bit more detail about what Web3PMs do on a daily basis. We'll talk a bit on a high level and also discuss tactical advice for executing well at your job. I'd also like to mention that while this approach should apply for everybody, your actual implementation details might differ based on whether you're at a larger company or a small startup. But in general, what I would say is that the job of a Web3PM is to bring novel crypto products to market with safe, secure, and high quality user experiences. And I'd break that down into four main stages of the product development process. Really the first is to identify a user's need. That would have a call stage one. In stage two, you are actually developing your product where you're aligning your cross-functional stakeholders. You're building the product and actually testing it in a pre-launch phase. Stage three is when you actually launch the product out to market and you go to market and also are able to measure your impact. And then after launch would be stage four, which is an improvement phase, which I would characterize as a phase where you are optimizing the product and deciding which features to prioritize on your roadmap into the future. That's a high level overview. Now let's dive into a bit more detail about each stage. In the first stage, which is stage one, you're really just identifying a core user problem that you think is worth solving. There are four main steps that I would highlight here in terms of how you might go about identifying that user problem. The first is to leverage all of your qualitative and quantitative sources at your disposal. These are things like user interviews, looking at consumer surveys, going on social media like Twitter, Reddit, etc. to see what are your users actually saying about your product. And then, of course, you can leverage quantitative tools such as events streaming from your front end or your back end. You can look at tools like Datadog or Amplitude or whatever stack you're using within your own organization. But through this step, you should have a pretty good idea of is there a user problem that is worth solving and allocating some of your precious resources, too. After that, it's really up to the PM to craft that vision and work backwards. What do I mean by that exactly? Well, look, as the PM, you are the ultimate champion for a particular feature or product. You're the one that needs to demonstrate to not only your team, but your stakeholders and even upwards management about why it's worth developing a particular product. There are a couple of effective tools to actually get that point across, one of which is called a PRFAQ. And that stands for press release and frequently asked questions. You can think about it as a document that you would craft when you're looking backwards post launch as, and you can say, here is the value that a user would expect to derive from this product. What is the message that you want the press to pick up when you actually go to market? And that can help you work backwards and fill in the blanks about what are the steps that you need to build in order to go to market with this product and also help to clarify what your ultimate long-term strategy is. At this point, you would also fill out a classic PRD document, probably a longer-term strategy document, and you would also begin to build a business case for why a particular product or feature needs to be built out. All throughout this process, you want to make sure to align your core team which could include designers, your engineering manager, data scientists, and ultimately your manager and anybody up the chain, including your executive team. It's crucial to also align any cross-functional stakeholders that you will need their resources and help with in order to get your product out to the market. In practice, some people will wait way too late in the game until they actually mention a particular product to their executive team. My philosophy is it's really important just to get your execs excited early, build up momentum for them that you are on the right track for developing a world-class product. With that, I think it's important early on as well to create mock-ups and prototypes with your designers and engineers to really bring the product vision to make it be usable and able to be interacted with. I think with that, you can help craft the story and get people around your organization really excited. Then with that, of course, as you march towards launch, you want to figure out exactly what the MVP is going to look like. Are there features or opportunities to put things in the V1 or the Vue Future? What exactly do you need in order to go to market with a safe, secure, and highly usable product? Lastly, once you have a very good idea of what that MVP is going to look like, you of course need to finalize all of your engineering resourcing and non-engineering resourcing as well too. You might need to interact with a myriad of cross-functional stakeholders, which include, as I mentioned, designers, engineers, data, but also people in finance and compliance, tax, accounting, and the list goes on. It's really important to just understand exactly whose help and partnership you are going to need early on in the game. Also with that, it's important to have a standardized process for accepting different sorts of resourcing requests and making them in the first place. I find it's always helpful just to put any dependency ass in writing, and when you encounter any sort of conflict about needing some work that ultimately there is no resourcing for escalating that up as needed as early as possible. Those are the four main points in Stage 1 I would highlight. Let's move on to Stage 2, which is the development phase. This is where you are jumping into the end execution effectively where you really get to bring your products to life. There are four key steps that I would highlight here. The first of which is the end development phase where you're working with your engineers and designers and other stakeholders to execute the PRD that you've already laid out. There's also an entire element of project execution that is critical and often overlooked, especially with larger more complex projects that ultimately might involve resources of many teams around the company. When you have these really thorny cross-functional projects that involve dozens or hundreds of partners, I find it's a really good practice to get a recurring touch point for live syncs or even asyncs with your cross-functional partners and start these very early in the project process. Ultimately, in many events, months or even quarters before you ultimately go to the market. It's really important to provide forms for your cross-functional stakeholders to bring up any blockers, report their progress in the process, and ultimately use that as a forcing function to keep the positive momentum going as you move closer and closer to your launch time. Now, as you're going through the development phase, I think it's also important to try to iterate and just get any feedback and prove points as possible that will help you to improve that ultimate MVP product. One thing that I love to do is just to get your product dog-fooded as early as possible. At Coinbase, we refer to dog-fooding as allowing people to test out the products in alpha or a beta phase or in some other fashion before you actually launch out to a general audience. It's really important through this way that you're able to potentially uncover errors in the user flow, bugs that you didn't see coming, or any other source of issues that might ultimately degrade from a safe and secure user experience. And moreover, it's really important just to invite feedback from everybody, get a diverse view of perspectives from as many stakeholders as possible. And then lastly, what I would mention is there's an element of stakeholder management when you're building these large complex products, which is, again, you want to keep your leadership in tune with updates about your particular project and provide updates, whether it's async or live. And if there are any blockers that will jeopardize timelines that you've established or feature functionality, escalate those and raise those early. We have a couple of tools at Coinbase to do that in particular. We have templates for those online you can look for, but two of them that I'll highlight are called a problem and proposed solution document, which is a lightweight tool for identifying a problem, proposing a solution, and moving forward. And then there's a more formal way for us to make decisions at scale, which we call a rapid. So let's move on to the next phase, which I've combined into stage three and four, which is really when you're launching your product in the world and then you begin to iterate. In terms of that pre-launch right around the launch timeline, that's when you want to finalize your rollout plan, work with your product marketers or your go-to-market team, and just figure out exactly what are the steps that you need to do to launch successfully on day one. Will there be a blog post? Are you going to be releasing a tweet on Twitter? Are you going to be releasing a note on Discord or any of your other social distribution channels to really drum up excitement? Next, it's also important to really drum in on what your A.B. testing strategy is going to be if you have the luxury of having that at your particular company. Lastly, you must also get any required cross-functional approval just in order to make sure that it's safe to launch your product to market. And then one tool that I would just recommend that everybody uses that has been really effective for our teams is to hold a pre-mortem meeting with your cross-functional stakeholders. So many times people will only hold a post-mortem meeting after something goes wrong with your launch, but you can really figure out any elephants in the room or uncover unknowns by getting together with your cross-functional team, asking yourself what could potentially go wrong with launch that we haven't already counted for, and you'll be sometimes surprised to see the collaborative and great ideas that can come out of that discussion that can ultimately help you make your launch as successful as possible. Then when you actually are ready to launch, you begin to roll out your product. It's really important to have a good idea of what metrics you're trying to optimize for and be tracking those on a regular basis. It's important also to take into account any qualitative user feedback that you might be seeing on Twitter or another social channel or feedback that's coming in through qualitative tools like internal surveys or other sorts of touch points in your product flows. I think it's also important, especially for larger, more public launches, to just communicate results upwards to the chain so that your execs are aware of how your products are faring and how the launch is progressing. So I highly recommend that as well. Then after your launch, that's really when the fun starts. It's when you begin to gather additional user feedback and you can begin to prioritize what you want to improve about the product in the short term and the long term. Are there bug fixes that you need to make right away? Are there small incremental feature improvements that will improve conversion that you could make in the next couple of days or weeks? Or are there any long term, chunkier product improvement epics that you will have to prioritize on like next quarter's roadmap or on your annual roadmap? So that's important to take into account after you actually launch the product to market. And so with that in mind, let's move on. What I would just first say is with this approach in mind, we've actually seen a robust ecosystem of crypto products actually get shipped out into the market over the past couple of years. We've seen the build out of a robust layer of developer tools, layer one, layer two, blockchains, DeFi applications, even some nascent gaming applications as well too. So you see a list of different applications here on the page and there is typically a PM or a product minded founder behind each one of these rollouts. And so having a very rational and deliberate product development framework can help you create massive products that reach millions and tens of millions of consumers around the world every day. So that is my overall product development framework here. I'd like to just also just touch on a few critical PM skills that I think can help us all in a Web3 context. There are really five key principles that I've been highlighting here and they are having deep user empathy, being mission driven, having a craft for quality, being bold often and then acting like an owner. So let's dive into each of those with a bit more detail. What does having deep user empathy actually mean? In practice that means being able to put yourselves in the shoes of a user. Can you understand their pain points? Can you understand their frame of reference? Do you understand the actual jobs to be done of a user using your product? And this seems simple but it's really more difficult than it seems at first glance. But this is an incredibly important skill because at the end of the day, shipping successful products used by millions of users around the world ultimately means that you are solving their top user pain points. And also with that, as the PM, your job internally is not just to ship the feature and build the feature out, but it's really to reflect the user's voice, especially when you're communicating your decisions, your strategy and other trade-offs to cross functional stakeholders. You're the one who needs to understand intuitively what the users want, what are their pain points, what are the biggest opportunities for making their lives a better place. Now, I don't think you're born with deep user empathy. You can obviously improve it and there are a couple of key ways to do that. The high level guidance I would say is just take any opportunity you can to interact with your users, whether you're in the street and you run into somebody using your product, ask them what their experience is. You can also do more formal customer interviews. You can also shadow your customer support team. It's really a good time to do that because often when you interview a customer 101, they won't tell you their true pain points or maybe they just haven't run into that issue at that particular time, but when people call your customer support, they might actually be running into an issue and so you can get a bit more insight into their particular pain points and it's often an illuminating experience. Lastly, of course, you should go on social media to understand how your users are interacting with your product and then I would just be using not only your product but other competitor products as well too. To understand does your product have any gaps? Are there any deficiencies that you haven't taken into account? Moreover, it gets you just more accustomed with the ecosystem of similar products. It's very important to build up a deep user empathy and now let's move on to the next core principle, which is to be mission driven. What does that exactly mean? To me, that means making proud decisions that are rooted in your company's vision or mission. This is really important because especially in a rapidly changing industry such as crypto, it's important to understand what the 5-year, 10-year, 15-year vision is for your team or for your company and as things are moving in flux as you're launching to new countries, as regulations are becoming more clear, as your user bases are changing, you can always look towards that long-term North Star and orient your team and your organization around that strategy. It helps to clarify ambiguity, it helps to clarify tough decisions and having a solid vision and mission can just help make your product development lifecycle much smoother. Lastly, ultimately, whatever you decide is your mission is supposed to be aligned with solving your customer pain points. It just makes again making new products at scale an easier process for the product manager. I also think this principle is a skill that you can improve. One way to do that is to roll up your sleeves and get some practice with writing strategy documents or writing documents that articulate a point of view about what your mission should be as a core team or company and then also it helps to verbalize that discussion with your manager or with your team and invite other cross-functional stakeholders into the fold to discuss ideas for what the strategy should be, what the vision is because ultimately your team has to be fully bought into whatever the vision and mission is. So it's important to get that feedback and get other perspectives when crafting that in the first place. So moving on, the next principle I mentioned is just around the importance of improving product quality as your company or within your team. As I mentioned previously, I fundamentally believe the job of a Web3PN is to build products that are hyper safe and hyper secure. If you really want to onboard the next couple of billion people into crypto, we need to create high quality, safe and simple products. It needs to be as easy for an advanced crypto user to interact with a crypto product as it is for my grandma to interact with those sorts of products. Ultimately, one bad product experience can result in user turns. So many teams just ship out a product to market or they only will develop for the advanced crypto users. But nonetheless, I think all crypto personas, whether you're advanced or beginner, will care about feeling safe and secure and not running into bugs, having a high performance product experience. So it is a principle that all Web3PNs should be practicing on a daily basis. What are some ways to improve it? Well, you can regularly dog food any of your production or alphabets to uncover product quality issues. Actually go out and watch some of your users use their products. You can ask your friends to use a product and get their feedback. And I would just say more over, sometimes there is a tension between prioritizing product quality improvements versus new feature development. But bear markets are a great time to just take your product to the next level. The next principle I would mention here is around being bold and being bold often. Today we're working in this crypto industry that is relatively new in the grand scheme of things. And what we're trying to do is disrupt the status quo and create these really robust product experiences that just can't exist in Web2. And so it's going to take a certain amount of boldness in order to create truly innovative products that change the world. And typically in these rapidly transforming markets, you have to innovate or die. And so it makes intuitive sense as a PM to have a mindset of being bold and being unafraid to make tough decisions, being unafraid to push the envelope and push the needle when you're building new products at scale. And moreover internally, there so often are stakeholders that will want to be conservative or not take risk. But as a PM, you need to be the loudest optimist, especially when your team or company or industry goes through certain market setbacks. So how do you improve this skill? What I would advise you to do is just find the bleeding edge of crypto and start to dig in. What does that mean? Well, today you might say the bleeding edge of crypto is happening on respective layer 2 blockchains or app chains. They're happening on various bridges between these apps. And so I would just advise you to get familiar with the ecosystem of these dApps and other services that are on the bleeding edge on the frontier and start to use them. Get familiar with what those advanced users are using on a daily basis. And this will help you to really craft your own perspective on how to be bold as a PM. Then ultimately, you want your decisions to map to your long-term strategy. And then you want to, of course, bring your execs into any discussion about taking bold product decisions. But ultimately, the way to make these innovative products that can reach tens or hundreds of millions of users on a daily basis is to disrupt the status quo. A couple more minutes here. The last one I'll mention is around the importance of just acting like an owner at your company. And so what I mean by that is so often a PM will say, I am the DRI or the directly responsible individual for this feature. Or I am responsible for only this aspect of the app. But really, when you're working at a company that is trying to disrupt the status quo and build a product that potentially could last multiple decades, you have to roll a group of sleeves and act in an incredibly scrappy fashion, even if that means taking on responsibilities or doing things that are not especially part of your job description. Why this is vital is because having this bias for action mindset not only can improve your organizational velocity, but it can help you develop more of a nuanced perspective as a product leader at your particular company. And then also, you know, when you're in a product org, there's instances of ambiguity every single day. And it's your job as a PM to help resolve those points of ambiguity and create order from chaos. And one way to do that is to have an act like an owner mindset, and that will help you to keep the org moving forward. So there are some ways you can improve this. What I would say to do is try to be as systematized in your decision making as possible. You can use templates for making decisions in a structured format. I mentioned a few earlier, like a PPS or a rapid, those are available, I believe on our website, but you should be able to use those if you so choose. Another way to act like an owner is to, again, roll up your sleeves and figure out where are some gaps in terms of initiatives at your company? Can you create a program for, you know, educating your PMS or can you create a mentorship program? I would really lean in and just figure out, like, where can you add value as a PM if it doesn't necessarily mean building a new product? Ultimately, you know, you were hired at your particular company to make the workplace a better place. And so I would really be looking for opportunities to just up level your product organization and overall company. Okay, lastly, what is the future of what 3 p.m. look like? I think if you're tuning into here, you either agree or, you know, have a strong hunch that the world is increasingly moving on chain. I think in the future, crypto is going to be increasingly important to solve user pain points in a world where commerce and economic activity is increasingly happening, you know, on layer one and layer two blockchain. So as a PM, what are some key considerations you might have for developing these on chain native products? So I'll list six here, you know, one is around facilitating real world use cases. Today, I don't think it's like a controversial thing to say, but, you know, it's impossible to take out student loan on chain. It's impossible to take out a mortgage on chain in an easy fashion that is. So I would advise pms over the next few years to really try to accelerate real world consumer and institutional products as a wedge to getting the next 100 million users or more to start interacting with crypto products. Next, I would say for pms, it's incredibly important to lean into this principle of product composability. I think we're going to see this incredible design space of composability that can be used to create these incredible, you know, consumer use cases at the forefront of gaming of defy and other. niches in crypto, and it's really important to lean into that idea of composability. The next one I mentioned is just around the regulatory environment, which is, you know, very uncertain in most jurisdictions around the world. But, you know, as a PM, you have to adhere to, you know, the hand your dealt and you have to game plan your product and go to market strategy around these evolving regulations that might be changing on a weekly quarterly basis. So it's important to work with your cross functional partners who might be closer to that to understand exactly how your products or your surface areas will be active. Next one is a fun one, you know, there's a term called the defy mullet, which effectively means there could be these products that are built at scale that combine the best of see fi and defy. And I think, you know, what I would advise is that over time, you're probably going to see some defy native products that are used at scale. But I think in general, you know, it's probably going to be many years before the entirety of defy or financial activity moves on chain. But you'll probably see an opportunity over the next few years or so to build some really cool use cases that incorporate both see fi and defy elements. And then lastly, what I'll mention is just around this idea of keeping data and privacy controls first center when you're developing products. It's incredibly important, especially in jurisdictions like the EU to maintain complete control over your user data, not to leak any privacy. I think that many people in crypto would agree that crypto safety and security is one of like the most fundamentally important aspects of deciding whether or not to interact with a product in the first place. So very important to keep in mind as a PM. And then lastly, I would just advise PMs to get creative about how to evolve their growth strategies. Really cool thing about what three is you have this open state. And there's data that you can use from public blockchains just to evolve your top of funnel strategies. So would involve advise PMs that are looking at, you know, what three to use that as a tool for expanding their top of funnel and ultimately improving conversion for their products. So that's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed today's content about being a PM at Web three. I've listed out my contact info here. Feel free to shoot me a note if you want to chat further, but otherwise really appreciate you tuning in today. And thank you very much and take care.