Your Guide to Web3 Product Management

Over the past few years, “Web3” has been one of the top buzzwords in the tech community. Those within the space ask what it is, how it affects them, and if it’s truly the future of the internet.

While Web3 hasn’t fully arrived, it has the potential to bring about new financial norms, marketplaces, social networks, and more.

In our Web3 product management guide, we provide information and insights on the following (plus more):

What is Web3?

In early 2022, Harvard Business Review (HBR) posted a poll on LinkedIn asking their readers “do you know what Web3 is?”

Of the 51,889 votes, 31% answered “yes” and 69% answered “no.”

While there is no strict or official definition of Web3, think about it as the next natural progression of the internet. 

Web3 vs. Web2 vs. Web1: What’s the difference?

From approximately 1991-2004, we were all using Web1. All websites were static or read-only, which meant that we didn’t interact with the webpage. Users would visit it to read information. There was no logging in, and the owner of the site had no analytics.

Then came Web2 – what we are using now. The biggest change from Web1 was the connection between the user and the internet. In Web2, users get data from the web pages they visit. At the same time, web pages collect information from their users. 

Finally, we have Web3, which uses blockchain technology that integrates concepts like decentralization and token-based economics. 

So, what’s the difference between Web3 and Web2? 

In Web2, private companies are making decisions for users. For example, on Facebook, if your post violates the community guidelines, it will be taken down automatically. 

Conversely, on Web3, if you want to post content, it’s going to stay there until you take it down. You have ownership and autonomy of the content you publish.

In simple terms, Web3 gives ownership back to users.

Web3 applications

Currently, Web3 is still in development. It is not fully realized yet, but some applications can already do things that Web3 describes. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

A quick Google search will give you more examples of applications that make use of Web3 concepts. There are several in existence. Each application has unique features but they all embody the core ideas of the next evolution of the World Wide Web: decentralization, permissionless, trustless, and native payments.

How can Product Managers get into Web3?

Web3 brings so many possibilities since it’s going to change the way users interact with the internet. But where and how do you get started as a product manager? Here are a few suggestions for how you can prepare for this new wave in tech.

Start learning

The first step is to read and understand key applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Get familiar with how they work by reading their whitepaper document.

There are also several free resources you can take advantage of to understand Web3 and its key concepts. Finematics on YouTube, for example, produces educational videos on DeFi (Decentralized Finance).

Of course, staying on top of Web3, even for people within the space, is a full-time job. There’s so much innovation that you may have to accept that you’re in an industry where you don’t know what’s happening 90% of the time. 

And that’s alright. You just have to know and understand the things that truly matter to you and have a way to stay on top of what’s important, such as a Web3 course with access to a community of peers.

Attend hackathons and Web3 conferences

Hackathons are great because they provide a safe environment for you to fail and learn. When you find a hackathon that you would like to join, volunteer yourself. Try to join a project and do what you can as a product manager. 

There’s no shortage of upcoming events that you can join. Sometimes you have to invest money to fly to a city where the hackathon is happening. 

In hackathons and conferences, you learn more and you get the chance to network in person with professionals in the industry. You can start building connections and ask your peers about what’s interesting in the industry.

When the opportunity arises, participate in building a product during the hackathon. It’s a valuable and interesting experience that you can add to your resume.

Do as the Web3 people do

The idea is to emulate what people in Web3 do so you can learn as much as you can. For example:

Do Defi AMM

AMMs are automated market makers. They are part of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. They allow digital assets to be traded in a permissionless and automatic way through liquidity pools as opposed to buyers and sellers. 

Unlike traditional transactions between buyers and sellers, an AMM ensures that no single entity can manipulate the transactions and that anyone can participate. Furthermore, the technology is decentralized and trading is always available. Use an AMM application to understand how to trade in decentralized finance (known as Defi), as opposed to trading with other buyers and sellers via a centralized intermediary. 

Review Gemini’s “What Are Automated Market Makers?” guide for additional information on AMMs.

Join a DAO 

DAO in crypto means decentralized autonomous organization, which is a kind of organization that operates under a shared goal. Instead of using traditional legal contracts, these organizations use “immutable smart contracts.” These contracts are written as code and put on blockchains like Ethereum.

Mainstream DAO use cases include crowdfunding, investment DAOs, governance DAOs, NFT DAOs, and social DAOs. Joining one or more types of DAO is the best way to understand the inner workings. For more information, review this Cointelegraph article.

Buy an NFT

NFT stands for non-fungible token. It’s digital data stored in a blockchain. NFTs can represent real-world objects like art, music, in-game items, and videos, or access to digital worlds in the Metaverse. They can prove ownership over a digital or physical asset depending on the issuer and metadata. Read the Decrypt guide to NFTs here.

Your goal is to become a crypto-native by immersing yourself in the niche.

Don’t Think About the Money

Once you become more comfortable in the Web3 space, you can start looking for opportunities. What’s great is the majority of the projects within Web3 are open-sourced. You can show up in a community’s Discord, volunteer to help and be paid in the form of native tokens in the project. Don’t even think about the money. Rather, think about the learning and the experience.

Learn From Previous PMs’ Web3 Experiences

Talking to experts who have managed a comparable role in their past experiences can provide you with first-hand information.

In my Web3 Product Manager Handbook, I have talked about real world applications and insights in designing, building, and scaling Web3 products.

Using the practical frameworks and strategies that I shared, you can catch on what it’s like to actually create a Web3 product that resonates with your end-users.

How to Prepare for your Web3 Product Manager Interview

At this point, you should start preparing for possible interviews. Although you may be armed with the right knowledge and experience in Web3, conquering PM interview questions related to Web3 is different.

In interviews, you will be asked a variety of PM interview questions. Examples include:

Here are a few practical suggestions on how you can prepare for an upcoming Web3 PM Interview:

Web3 companies hiring product managers

Even though Web3 is still in its infancy, there’s no shortage of companies hiring product managers. These include:

And remember, new Web3 startups are continually coming to life. This allows you to “get in” on the ground floor. 

Web3 product manager salary

Product manager salaries vary based on factors such as the company, job title, experience, and key responsibilities. 

According to Glassdoor, the estimated total pay for a Product Manager is $127,653 per year in the United States. But that doesn’t tell the entire story. 

For example, senior product managers can expect a salary in the $149K to $240K/year range. That’s in addition to $50k+ paid in the form of cash bonuses, commissions, tips, and profit sharing.

The best way to understand Web3 PM salaries is to review job openings within the industry. Here’s an example job listing: Chainswipe is hiring a Director of Product (Web3)

The compensation is listed as $150k – $200k/year. 

The more job listings you compare, the more you’ll understand how your experience equates to pay. 

Skills and responsibilities of a product manager at a Web3 company

Much the same as salary, the skills required and responsibilities of a product manager at an established Web3 company or a startup will vary. 

To start, there are three basic levels in a product manager’s career:

With this in mind, let’s turn our attention to PM responsibilities. At a high level, you can expect to partake in all of the following:

In a Web3 working environment, your responsibilities as a PM are a bit different. Here are some examples of how they differ. 

Let’s take a closer look at the responsibilities of a PM at Alchemy:

As you review PM job listings, you’ll find that responsibilities vary from one opening to the next. Some are aligned with more traditional PM jobs, while others have a stronger Web3 focus. 

Objectives in Web3

Objectives in Web3 protocol launches and updates are important because Web3 protocols, which are the foundations of any Web3 user interface, don’t change as frequently as Web2 products and yet, they have the potential to become the building blocks of the new internet.

Similar to hardware product launches or communication protocols such as TCP IP and Bluetooth, Web3 protocols have a slower iteration cycle and this would mean that we have to think carefully about the objective of each protocol launch or upgrade.

Without a clearly defined objective, a product & engineering team will be at the risk of spreading itself too thin by doing R&D work in multiple areas. And given it is inherently difficult to make progress in the R&D space, you will not achieve any tangible outcome if you are not selective about where you focus your R&D resources. 

If the objective is not clearly defined, it will always feel like you are 95% done with launching your protocol but you continue your struggle to cross the finish line, wondering why you can’t reach the destination that seems very close to you.

The clearer the objective for a product launch, the more focused your resources are going to be on having a successful launch and the sooner you will be able to launch your product. 

To bring more clarity to your objective, you will need to define it by a set of measurable metrics. These metrics will represent multiple aspects of the product such as product performance, adoption, and engagement. In other words, the objective is represented by metrics that lead up to the fulfillment of the main goal.

How to Define Project Objectives

When you start PMing projects across an organization, you must first communicate that you need precise objectives with defined criteria for success. Most likely, the organization you’re joining won’t have specific objectives yet – a scenario that’s common in Web3 organizations.

As a PM who is properly trained for operating in Web3, this is an area where you can have a significantly positive impact. If the company doesn’t have clearly defined objectives and success criteria, someone in the product team (perhaps yourself) must take the responsibility of defining product objectives for the team’s next product launch. 

This is going to be intensive work with high ROI for the team and will require you to come up with proposals, obtain feedback from different team members, iterate based on that feedback, and bring alignment across the organization. But, before that, you have to consider five things:

1. Size of the Objective

Remember that the bigger the objective, the longer it’s going to take to accomplish. Inversely, the smaller the objective, the quicker it’ll be for the organization to achieve it because there are fewer unknowns. Smaller objectives are also more tangible. It’ll be easier for you to get the teams excited about staying focused if you focus on a smaller goal.

2. Different Perspectives

The objective that you define should consider different perspectives. As a product-led organization (something that I am interested in teaching you how to build in Web3), you need to make sure that other areas – marketing, legal, business development, and others – have clear objectives as well.

Doing this impacts the kind of support that Product Managers provide to respective teams. It impacts engineering resources as well. For example, let’s say marketing wants a certain number of engagements. You need to ask yourself “Does this require some level of product support in terms of web pages, engagement with the community, and running testnets?”

3. Clear Objective = Properly Allocated Resources

The more specific and clearer your objective is, the easier it will be for you to estimate and allocate the resources needed to achieve the objective. Let’s look at an example of a layer 1 launch.

The objective and criteria are going to matter for you to know what type of resources are needed to launch the layer 1. Here are some questions you should be asking yourself:

Should it enable transactions on Day 1?

Ethereum 2 didn’t enable transactions when it was first launched. How about your layer 1? Remember that you want to ship an MVP and ship it fast.

Should it support X number of nodes?

Ideally, we want the mainnet to support an unlimited number of nodes but the number of nodes that the current market offers should be taken into consideration. There are also other questions to ask concerning nodes that can significantly impact where you allocate your resources:

Should it have a 0 chance of network halt?

Most L1 projects, including Bitcoin, had multiple network halts in the early days of their projects. Do you need to build a network from day 1 that achieves the objective of no network halts?

The same conversation can take place when you apply these types of questions in the context of launching a layer 2 or 3.

4. Multiple Criteria for Success

There must be multiple criteria for success connected to an objective to ensure that you don’t overshoot in one area at the cost of quality. You want to include success criteria that apply to everybody in the organization, each metric representing one or multiple aspect(s) or department(s) of the organization. For example, marketing will need their criteria for success such as brand awareness, number of new community members, or number of website visitors.

5. Drive the Key Objective

There will be cases when you may need to make product decisions that might not seem directly related to the criteria of success you have determined for your product objective. Approach these situations by considering if you are still able to achieve your objective even if you change the scope of the work (e.g. does eliminating the task still allow you to achieve your objective and success criteria? do you need to adjust your objective and success criteria doc?).

The above five items may seem that they are intended for the CEO, but the reality is that product managers are the glue that stick the team together. PMs are the ones who will eventually deliver, therefore, it is in the best interest of the organization to have someone from the product team lead the development of objectives in collaboration with the CEO, business, legal, engineering, and all other departments.

Identifying Your Success Criteria

Each success criterion should have its own spectrum of achievability. As the metric associated with the success criteria moves toward the harder-to-achieve side of the spectrum, the effort that goes into achieving it exponentially increases. Let’s say that one of your criteria for success is the number of accounts that are created on your protocol within the first 10 days after the product launch. 

To find 100 users to create an account, you can use unscalable methods such as asking your friends and a small community to create accounts right away. Compare that to the success criteria of 10,000 user accounts which will require a much more complex marketing engine, and will also need more support from the product management and engineering teams.

Similar to how objectives need to be smaller, it’s better to think about going with an easier to achieve success criteria, learn from challenges, and iterate quickly. Your success criteria have to be achievable and realistic.

The Next Step: Impact of Objectives

When you develop your objective, you’re communicating to the organization that this is the “lens” from which you are evaluating tasks and trade-offs in the organization. With the objective and success criteria in place, the team learns that this is how they should communicate or discuss results with you. This will encourage them to prioritize their time on things that show progress in achieving the objective and success criteria. As a result, your standup meetings will become more structured around delivering on the objective and the team’s weekly updates will also be around how everyone is working towards achieving the objective.

Objectives Can Change Frequently

Objectives frequently change because hard conversations and alignment take time. If difficult conversations are happening and you are going back and forth between different stakeholders, it shows that you are doing an impactful job as a product manager. 

One way for you to know if these difficult conversations are going to result in progress is for you to assess if they are moving the team closer to deciding on the near-term objective and success criteria. However, you need to ensure decisions are being made (and you can expedite this process by suggesting objectives and success criteria) and that the objective and success criteria are planned to be finalized by a certain date.

The CEO of the organization may have an over-optimistic view of what can be achieved in a certain period of time. It is your job as a PM to persuade the stakeholders, including the CEO, with factual data to make difficult decisions regarding the objective and success criteria that results in a document outlining deliverables that you think are achievable.

Remote product management in Web3

Before we proceed, make note that product management in a remote environment varies in difficulty from position to position, company to company, and product to product. 

For example, it’s much more challenging when there’s an element of R&D (which is the reality of Web3 projects) because it relies heavily on discovering knowledge, sharing it, and adjusting course accordingly.

Knowledge sharing

The most important aspect of knowledge sharing is that it’s being done properly, which includes documentation of code and all new knowledge that’s being created for both internal and external use cases.

There should be a process that enables different teams and projects to update each other on their progress every week. The best way to do this is to schedule a weekly meeting where people share updates so that every team member is aware of where everyone is with their area of research and development.

In regards to the frequency of daily standups, it’s best to have a minimum of two stand-up sessions per week. This ensures that there’s enough time for knowledge sharing across your team.

Product managers should also take the lead in asking for “launch & learn” meetings during which participants can distribute knowledge to others. It’s important to record the meetings so that the content can be shared with those who are unable to attend, as well as future hires.

Tip: place all of the video files into a repository by using a tool such as Rewatch or Notion. This provides future employees with easy access to content that had already been shared with the team in the past.

A defined process and well-thought-out method for knowledge sharing allow you to move quickly without making wrong assumptions about progress and/or what others have achieved.

The remote product development process

In a remote environment, it’s critical that you still have two-week sprints. Furthermore, you should never extend the length of a sprint because you failed to complete a specific task. If things are taking longer than anticipated, end your existing sprint on the originally planned end date and start a new one as previously planned. This way you always know how much you’re completing within each two-week time frame.

You will also have to do retrospectives more frequently as this is the ideal opportunity for people to collect feedback and adjust course based on what they receive from others.

It’s ideal to schedule retros at the end of every sprint until the team reaches a point where there’s a consensus that all major issues have been addressed. From there, you can reduce the frequency to one retro per every other sprint.

Timezone-based teams

Another essential aspect of the remote product development process is ensuring that teams are built around time zones. Ideally, each project should have a minimum of four hours shared between team members. This allows for efficient synchronous communication.

Even if a company as a whole is distributed, as a product manager it’s your responsibility to focus on the specific needs of your project. Make sure that there are enough hours for team members to coordinate and exchange ideas with each other.

For efficiency, attempt to move meetings to as early in the day as possible (for as many team members as possible). So, if there are four hours of overlap for all team members, have those meetings at the start of those hours. This allows for the engineering team to remain focused, as opposed to constant disruptions for meetings.

Build Personal Relationships with Your Team Members

Through your communications, do your part to build a personal relationship with all team members. One of the best ways to do this is by scheduling an offsite gathering once every three to six months.

As a product manager, don’t hesitate to make this suggestion to the organization. Explain the importance of personal relationships and the impact they have on the outcome of the project.

You should also schedule monthly individual meetings with every team member. Not only does this help build a personal relationship, but it also allows you to hear their perspectives and concerns so you can address them.

Publicize product priorities and objectives

With remote teams, transparency is critical to success. By publicly sharing product priorities and objectives with your community, you provide a clear signal to the organization and engineering team as to what your areas of focus are.

Even when you’re not interacting with others in real time, they’ll still know what the key objectives and priorities are. There’s no gray area, which makes for a more efficient and productive product development process.

All five of these are critical to successful product management in remote environments. We’ll revisit these topics and their practical usage in day-to-day product management in future lessons.

Product Management in Emerging Industries

In this lesson, we will highlight some of the emerging trends that are important in the industry because we’re going to discuss them in a lot more detail in the next few weeks.

DeFi

DeFi’s initial promise was highlighted in the Ethereum whitepaper with decentralized exchanges and decentralized lending. After the launch of Ethereum, some decentralized exchanges such as 0x and AirSwap emerged. They allowed users to custody their own digital assets and still do a trade without having a third party custody their digital assets for them.

But the volume of decentralized finance did not grow significantly until MakerDAO introduced the concept of algorithmically determined stablecoins that were permissionless. The permissionless aspect of DAI enabled the Web3 developers to build applications on top of the stablecoin. This was the first time a user could utilize their digital assets to get a loan in the form of US dollars in the form of a stablecoin that is also programmable and permissionless.

The minting of a DAI stablecoin is done algorithmically by borrowers sending their ethers to a particular address, locking them there, then receiving the stablecoins in return. 

The permissionless nature of DAI resulted in a lot of interesting use cases (e.g. decentralized lending) that could be trustless, whereas up until that point, stablecoins were permissioned because they were mapped to a fiat currency that was stored in a bank. In other words, in contrast to previous stablecoins that could be burnt or minted by a centralized organization, DAI was minted and burnt algorithmically, giving it a level of trust that could have never existed for programming and building financial products on top of it.

By 2020, which many in the crypto space call DeFi summer, there were hundreds of different DeFi protocols coming out, enabling a wide range of use cases in DEFI with stablecoins, lending, decentralized exchanges, and more.

One of the important DEFI primitives is Uniswap as it has played a significant role in simplifying the concept of liquidity pools by enabling the creation of a liquidity pool that determines the price of a trading pair based on an algorithm that is executed by smart contracts.

There is still a lot of innovation in DeFi. The volume of transactions grew from $21 billion in 2019 to $270 billion in 2020. It is also worth mentioning that 95% of those transactions were made on Ethereum, whereas there is a large volume of DEFI transactions in other layer 1 protocols today.

The following year, the volume of DeFi transactions by Q2 grew by over 60%. By the end of 2021, the total value locked (TVL) reached $303.8 billion. At that time, the estimated worth of the global financial services market was $23.3 trillion. Despite DeFi’s growth, it only accounted for 1% of the total which means that there’s a lot of room for growth in the DeFi sector.

The combined TVL of all DeFi protocols dropped to $96.3B as of September 2022. The 2022 TVL is certainly lower compared to the previous year because we are currently on the bear side of the 4-year crypto cycle. The bear side or bear market in crypto is a period of a downward trend in crypto prices.

Check out these links if you’re interested in learning more about the currently popular DEFI projects:

DeFi has the potential of allowing users to have financial activities without having to go through intermediaries such as banks and continues to attract a large volume of talent and capital in the space. In addition, almost all new L1 projects start their ecosystem by offering DEFI primitives. As a result, Product Managers need to have a good understanding of how DEFI is emerging.

NFTs

Back in 2017, NFTs were presented in the form of a JPEG file that was owned by a particular wallet address. But, NFTs are more of an association of a unique set of codes or a unique file with a particular address. This concept has significant use cases. For example, an NFT holder can gain access to certain rights such as material, codes, verses, or governance in the digital world.

NFTs are at the beginning of their emergence today. They’re mostly presented in a very simple form – usually images – due to the high costs of storing large and complex files in a decentralized format but NFTs are a foundational technology that enables various use cases in the digital world.

Privacy-Preserving Apps

Privacy-preserving apps couldn’t truly exist until now because you always had to store your data with a source of trust, whether that is Facebook, a Bank, Apple, or a credit score provider, and trust that they will be good actors.

Trustless protocols, on the other hand, are different because they allow you to keep your private information to yourself but still interact with applications in a way you find fit.

This redefines the meaning of privacy because you can now prove a particular fact about yourself without revealing any unnecessary information. Whether that fact is your net worth, your activities, your reputation, or something else. 

Verification of truth without revealing the truth itself will have a significant impact on digital transformation as it allows the digital world to be built while privacy is at the center of it. Technologies like Zero-Knowledge proofs unlock the power of privacy-preserving apps, and this is an industry that will grow significantly over the next few years.

Decentralized Governance

For a decentralized protocol to flourish in the long run, there still needs to be governance over it – but the governance needs to be as decentralized as possible.

There have been a lot of discussions in the Web3 community on what the right way of enabling governance in decentralized protocols should look like. There are different theories on this. In its simplest form, decentralized/on-chain governance has been defined as “one coin, one vote” which means that you will get more votes if you hold more tokens. 

On the other hand, Vitalik Buterin founder of Ethereum thinks, “There is much more that can be done in researching and developing non-coin-driven governance algorithms. The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of governance decentralization.”

Vitalik’s view stems from the theory that aiming for a 51% majority is a very archaic way of governing. The 51% that voted to get a new initiative to get started today might drop to 49% by tomorrow. As a result, no big change ever really gets done, resulting in stagnation in the community and protocol.

Governance is an area of research with significant impact. There are many projects and research papers in this area but with decentralized consensus mechanisms, there will be very different governance structures that could exist for both decentralized protocols because of a lack of desire to trust an individual.

Product managers must pay close attention to how governance in their projects is being structured, developed, and practiced because it will have a significant impact on the health of their ecosystem in the long run. It will impact the target audience, their level of engagement, and the protocol’s ecosystem as a whole.

Social Tokens

Traditionally, social media providers have treated their users as their products, and they’ve been in the business of selling their products to the highest bidders (advertisers). But with social tokens, you’re able to change the dynamics of the relationship and think about the end user being the end customer.

Because you can maintain the privacy and custody of your own data with social tokens, we can redefine what a digital social relationship looks like and optimize the interactions around what makes the most sense for the users instead of their buyers. 

There are a few social token projects that are leveraging some of the emerging concepts like NFTs to enable unique social structures in the world of Web3. The Lens protocol, for example, actually defines every user interaction as an NFT which enables other projects to come in and build applications on top of it.

Bridges

In the early phases of crypto, there were only one or two blockchains (Bitcoin and Ethereum) and all Web3 transactions were centered around them. This created many challenges such as scalability and a limited volume of innovation in the settlement layer.

We are now, however, marching towards a world where there are multiple blockchains, each optimized for its unique set of use cases. At the same time, these blockchains are connected via bridges that enable passing the state of one chain to another chain. This not only solves some of the scalability issues, but it makes Web3 more distributed and decentralized.

Bridges are an emerging area because they’re increasing connectivity between different ecosystems but the jury on whether or not they are a long-term foundational technology is still out. More on this in the coming weeks.

Web3 Product Management: Community

We are now going to dive into the open-source aspect of Product Management in Web3 projects. Note that some projects only touch the application layer (Layer 3) whereas others are dealing with smart contracts (layer 2) or lower-level programming language (layer 1). The specifics of your product management process will depend on the layer you are operating on.

In the layer 1 and layer 2 scenarios, there will be part of the technology stack that you have to make open source to meet the expectations of your community. 

Open Source License

If your project doesn’t have a protocol or smart contract as part of the technology stack that you are developing, you can apply the traditional Web2 Product Management principles to develop your product. 

However, when, for example, your project’s output includes a protocol, the developer community expects you to open source the parts that represent the ingredients of the protocol so they can validate on their own that the trustless modules of your project are truly trustless with no paths to centralization.

To gain a reputation in the Web3 community, your open source code must be licensed under Apache License 2.0 which allows software developers to make alterations to the source code of an existing application source code while preserving the copyright and license notices of the code.

Apache License 2.0 is important to the developer community because they like to have the assurance that they will not be legally pursued for damages or compensations by the original code developer in case the copied code is successfully used by a different group of individuals. 

In addition, the open source code enables the developer community to review your project’s codebase and decide for themselves if your implementation approach is acceptable by their criteria.

How to manage the risk of copycats and protect your community

As a product manager, you must embrace the concept of community management and help build an ecosystem that is optimized for community engagement. Here are some tips you can follow:

Foster a Close Working Relationship with the Community Manager

The community manager’s voice will best represent the community. They are usually aware of the concerns of the community. In traditional Web2 projects, product managers have a close relationship with the user researchers to ensure that they stay close to the needs of their users. In the world of Web3, community managers generally play the role of speaking on behalf of the community.

In addition, community managers can also be the person who will help you answer community questions and address them and become aware of the issues within the community.

DevRel should Report to the Product Management Team

If you are developing a layer 1 or layer 2 project that includes a protocol, your company will need to hire a Developer Relations (DevRel) individual at some point to help developers build on top of your protocol.

Generally, DevRel reports to engineering. However, in Web3, it makes sense to have DevRel report to the product management team to reduce the distance between the community and product management. 

When DevRel reports to the product management team, PMs can efficiently address the needs of the developers who are building on top of their protocol.

Use Discord for Conversation

Many consider Discord as a distraction given the large number of groups and public conversations happening in each channel but the platform’s advantage, in the case of Web3, is that it can present to the community that the product and engineering teams work harmoniously with a positive feedback loop. 

Discord enables you as a product manager to directly engage with the community members (and hear their perspectives). Discord also enables you to build personal relationships with community leaders, reducing the likelihood of their departure in case of new competition entering the space.

Ensure that there’s a Process for the Community to Raise Concerns

There are various tools at your disposal to enable the community to voice their concerns and issues. For the technical side, GitHub enables you to allow community members to create tickets for issues they believe should be addressed. 

The process where anyone in the community can create Github issues may feel unpleasant because there will be many duplicates and unimportant tickets coming your way but instead of suppressing the voice of the community, you must build a process for triaging and properly evaluating new issues that are raised. This will allow you to also fill up the backlog of your product priorities with tasks that are important to the community.

Organize Frequent Community Meetings

Frequent community meetings are a great way to obtain feedback from the community on what should be of high priority and why. 

For example, if you are PMing a layer 1 project and are focused on building additional features for the protocol, you might realize from the community that they are dealing with a lot of challenges in running a node on your network and are asking you to prioritize improving the existing node operation experience instead of building new features such as increasing the network TPS.

In the end, it is up to the product manager to decide what is of the highest priority but hearing the community’s needs in community meetings and explaining your rationale on cases where it doesn’t match with the expectations of the community helps your project stay more aligned with the expectations of the community.

Note that community meetings do not have to be organized by the product managers. They are usually under the responsibility of the community managers.

Provide Updates in the Form of Blogs

You can provide updates via blog posts, such as product development progress or change in product priorities, with the community frequently. This is a great way for you to also drive engagement and conversation in the community because you can post the link to the blog on Discord and invite the community members to share their feedback. It also allows them to stay updated with your project by quickly visiting your project’s progress status on Discord.

Create a Wiki

The content of the Wiki will depend on the pain point that you are addressing, but as long as you have passed some moderation power to the community, you will observe that they will determine the right content to be presented on the Wiki.

Wiki’s represent and hint at some level of decentralization for a Web3 project. They are a great tool to engage the community and send a positive signal that your project and content are decentralized and open source.

Helpful Web3 product management tools

Given the unique aspects of Web3 product development, projects have evolved around using unique tools and processes that optimize for their needs.

Below, we have introduced a few services that are popular among the Web3 community of builders. It’s good to spend time familiarizing yourself with them as you’ll be using them in your career to contribute to the Web3 ecosystem.

Dework

A great tool you can use to project manage Web3 projects. It’s similar to how Jira works but it’s optimized for Web3 (e.g. people can contribute to multiple projects).

A Dework user will have a public profile that contains all of their contributions to various web3 ecosystems. In addition, Dework enables contributors to view a list of grant projects that are available for individuals to pick up. This is one of the unique aspects of web3 that is not supported by existing tools such as Jira.

GitHub

You are most likely familiar with GitHub as the most popular repository for developers. However, GitHub is more important in the world of Web3 because of some of the functionalities it offers open source projects.

Loom

While Loom plays an important role in our daily communications in product management, it plays a more important role in web3 because of the reality that people operate in different timezones. Most effective web3 teams rely heavily on Loom to communicate progress and updates with each other.

Block Explorers

Block explorers are one of the most important tools for layer 1 projects. A block explorer enables its users to review the history of transactions in the blockchain and determine what eventually made it to the chain.

How to break into Web3 product management

With our guide to Web3 product management, you’re on the fast track to heading down this career path. For those seeking additional guidance, our Product Management for Web3 cohort is exactly what you need.

As a four-week live online program with a small group of product managers, you’ll learn the necessary concepts for navigating through the Web3 space and being an effective PM. But that’s not all. You also get:

For more information or to sign up for the next session, visit our Product Management for Web3 cohort program details.