A product manager's guide to Web3

Great piece, but it makes me feel like I'm atypical in my field, and perhaps that as the product field has grown up it's become super boring. I have no doubt that some PM jobs are the way you stereotype web2, especially at big tech companies. But I would never want one of those roles.

I've been a PM by title for 15 years, longer by responsibility/scope. I've always been a 0-1, often pre-PMF, always shipping, always carrying water for ENG and UX, often writing prototype code and sometimes landing patches. PM'ing in these cases is always more art than science, there's never enough data, you have to make decisions, execute, and own it. I also currently work at Mozilla where our code, our bugs, and our community chatter is all in the open.

Product has matured a lot since I got into it. I'm grateful there are career tracks and resources for folks to grow and move companies. I have noticed that the PM role has ossified at many companies, and seen it at events. If the majority of the PM jobs are the way you describe the web2 space -- watching a graph go up and down, abstracted away from engineering and technical exploration, removed from the shipping process, writing TPS reports -- that makes me sad for the field. There will always be a need for 0-1 PMs (whatever the job title actually is) because small teams especially hit velocity (velocity = speed + direction) ceilings. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you're headed in the wrong direction.

Strategy gets a bad name because so many big companies do it so badly. Strategy is choices + execution. If a company decides to prioritize devrel (as rexstjohn suggested) that's strategy.

I'm curious what this will look like in a year since I think the overall trend in product management is orthogonal to the idea "persuasion and coordination have been core to the web2 PM job. Those skills don’t matter as much here."

It seems to imply that web3 is kind of like a certain era of 'web 2' startups where engineers were king and there was a "if you build it they will come' mentality. In other words, customer-second.

My hunch is that web3 will actually need to go in the opposite direction. The value of products has ALWAYS been what customers think of it; web3 just makes that even more direct. Right now there's a kind of 'if it's cool' aspect to web3 projects but to cross the chasm to wider adoption, we'll need to see more human pain points being effectively addressed and communicated and the PM should be the point person in discovering what to build and how to create value for customers.

Preface:

This article is likely focusing on non-developer platform projects. There are plenty of scenarios in Web3 which don't target developer end users so this article is probably perfectly valid for all those use cases. Neat article.

For a lot of other Web3 platforms (the one's i'm interested in looking at):

Web3 is a developer lead revolution. Over the last 25 years, developers have gone from being "nice to have" to being the center of the entire universe. One app can make or break a Web3 platform. Expecting the battle to get developers in the door to reach levels never seen in history. Like WWWIII for developer experience.

Even now, there are only a handful of Solidity developers listed on LinkedIn versus the total market demand: Moving 100% of the existing financial system over to a new technology stack (opportunity: 100% of all money, forever) is going to require vast armies of devs.

Current state of the market: Many, many "prior era" developers are not on board with this web3 revolution. Their skills will be badly needed.

The idea that developer experience is not the centerpiece of all platform product management in web3 blows my mind. In seeing the conversations online and talking to people in web3 industry, the current conception of developer relations, as a field, sounds like "we want to hire a junior engineer who sort of sits in discord and writes an article here and there."

This is NOT what developer relations looks like at world class levels, at enterprise scale.

I have seen this play out several times. The last iteration: Twilio and Stripe wiped the floor with everyone because they built developer first. That means emphasizing developer experience in the design of their products.

It has been long enough that a lot of new generation don't remember how that happened and why.

I think it is a result of market immaturity, expecting, as competition increases, that more and more enterprise grade DevRel is going to make or break the success of Web3 platforms.

Could be another 6-12 months, but I feel the change is going to happen fast and people who don't catch on (but are able to raise significant funds in this hyper "easy money" environment) might get away with coasting for a bit.

Will be driven by competitive forces, could be wrong But feels like will need to change.

My current belief is that the "Era" of Product Management lead innovation is probably over. Google and Facebook Product Managers were the "go to" people of last wave in tech.

In this wave, why wouldn't DevRel be the new PMs? Lets see if my theory is correct. I could be wrong!