Breaking into DeFi: Making the Transition as a Product Manager
I promised myself this year I’d start writing about my journey in crypto, DeFi in particular. This is going to be the first of (hopefully) many posts. I want to keep it very relaxed, so I apologise in advance if I don’t spend enough time editing.
This post is about why I believe crypto offers an opportunity to make a huge difference and how I managed to make the transition without prior industry experience.
Why now
I’ve been asked this question many times. The first time I had the eureka moment was when I was completing one of the great Reforge programs. They are my go-to when it comes to content quality, mental models and frameworks for anything product-related in tech. The people behind the content and lectures are the ones who did the actual work.
At some point along the program, I thought, These people are sharing, in hindsight, how they managed to build the most successful products in tech over the past 20 years or so. But they were early on riding that wave and figuring things out most of the time. Only now they are making sense of all that learning, by wrapping best practices and wins into frameworks and concepts for others to use. Don’t get me wrong, these tools are great, but I don’t believe the next wave of innovations will come from applying what worked that long ago. The best time to join these successful companies was back then, in the very beginning.
Regardless of what you think of crypto (but assuming you understand the tech), I believe it presents a great opportunity to capitalise in a similar way.
In the early days of the internet, it was kind of illegal to have money, for example. Internet was a research project still, e-comm hadn't yet taken off and secure payments systems were not even on the radar. The Internet went sideways for a while with mostly bad actors and criminals using the first versions of encryption by 1995. It was easy for a regulator back then to push back and kill any kind of growth for this new tech. Now we know what happened after.
I think crypto is in a similar position. It takes time for new tech to develop positive use cases and reach escape velocity. Bad actors? Yes. Technical challenges? Yes. Unhappy regulators? You bet. But can we see the forest for the trees? Can we see the possibilities? Don’t believe me, listen to Marc Andreessen & Chris Dixon in this episode.
I want to be part of the story we tell in the future, in hindsight. That’s what I find exciting. I could have stayed on the side, waiting for the next cohort of successful leaders to come up with a few playbooks, or I could jump in today and had an active role in shaping and defining what building successful products in crypto looks like. And I know there’s a long way ahead, but that’s exactly why it's a good time now.
How did I start in crypto
I remember someone at work talking about Bitcoin back in 2012. It was my first job and had plenty of things to learn on my plate already. The narrative didn't stick with me. I just didn't get it.
Over the years, I’d heard rumours about Ethereum but I just dismissed it as some kind of altcoin gambling. But by the end of 2020, I bought my first crypto (ETH) without understanding much about it.
What I did understand tho, was that Ethereum was a completely different beast. I could see the technology’s potential beyond the asset. I learned the concept of Ethereum-Virtual-Machine (EVM), a supercomputer where others can build decentralised applications on top, using smart contracts. A backbone, a settlement layer, a new internet! (some call it web3). And at the same time, ETH the ‘asset’, acting as ‘internet money’. The bull case for Ethereum from Packy McCornick was the best piece I read at that time.
The key to understanding was to unbundle the financial (and speculative) aspect of Ethereum (ETH) from the smart contract-based blockchain (Ethereum). That’s one of the main reasons Ethereum is so misunderstood.
By 2021, alternative layer 1s (to Ethereum) blockchains were popping everywhere. FOMO and hype were at all-time highs. NFTs were picking up steam to the point of madness. I bought some for fun and more than once I’d get ‘the look’ from my girlfriend when I often failed miserably to mint an NFT project, like a kid failing to complete an album of figurines**.**
To make sense of it, I read everything I could find about this new ‘creator’s economy’. You see, that’s the thing with new technology, you won’t find books, articles or podcasts to help you understand. That's how you know it's still early days. Having said that, the most compelling thing I found at the time was this piece from Eugene Wei, Status-as-a-service. If you think spending thousands on a Jpeg is crazy, remember, we are ‘status-seeking monkeys’ optimising for social capital.
By the time I decided to make my transition at the end of 2022, I already spent countless hours of my free time learning more about this industry, finding a signal among all the noise, crypto-bros and cult-like following.
How did I make the transition
To make the transition, I started by defining a strategy. How could I move as soon as possible? To which space? I knew I could leverage two things:
- Crypto is still very technical: As a former developer, my technical background is an advantage today. But that would fade over time so the opportunity window is open now.
- Non-technical roles proliferation: At the same time, more startups / projects were looking for roles beyond engineers. Ranging from marketing, biz dev and product. As dev teams grow, roles like product managers start to look like obvious next hires.
From there, I laid out an action plan with the following options:
- Build: Get a foot in the industry by showing something you’ve built. This was before chatGPT so now should be even easier.
- Contribute: Find a community you feel connected with and contribute in any shape or form.
- Get a job: Get hired by a crypto-native company, where you can learn about the industry and contribute with your skills.
This is how it followed. First, I collected some ideas and completed a few tutorials on how to build a basic dApp. Just building a simple dApp yourself is making progress in all three options above.
At the same time, I joined different communities here and there, looking to connect with people and contribute somehow. But finding the right fit proved to be quite challenging for different reasons. The Discord and Telegram approach is broken. Unless you’re spending a ridiculous amount of time on messaging platforms (which I don’t) it's impossible to keep track of a group of 300+ people talking randomly (most of the time). Plus, not great for my digital minimalism either.
Now, I also had a few tricks to start paving my way to a job in crypto. I’ll probably write a different post for interviewing as a Product Manager in general, but my strategy, at a very high level, can be reduced to ‘make companies come to you’. You want to make recruiters and hiring managers to come to you, not the other way around.
But I had a discoverability problem. Recruiters, for example, usually use a platform like Linkedin, to search for keywords, based on a mix of skills and relevant experience. So how can you tell the world about all that time invested in learning about crypto without talking to them? By adding those relevant keywords to your profile. This can be adding new skills through a learning platform (easier), updating your bio, adding a side project, etc. I’m not saying recruiters only use this approach, but all of them will use this approach at some point. Interviewing is a number game.
Soon, I started to get profile views and inboxes from people in crypto. I had some interesting conversations and others not so much. But the goal was to find the gaps I had (if any) and learn what companies were looking for. Why they were looking for a product manager? Are they confusing the role for a project manager? If you know me well, you know I have nightmares when people use them interchangeably. Another prompt, for another post.
In the end, I’ve only managed to complete a tutorial for building a dapp (very useful by the way), I couldn't find the right community for me (but still looking) and what started as fieldwork in the crypto job market became a formal job offer. All this happened in around 2 months, from defining my strategy to getting my first offer.
Fast forward 6 months, I joined Chainflip Labs and feel energized and excited as an insider now, witnessing the level of progress happening on so many fronts. Im here to stay.
Why I am staying for the long run
Crypto has never been stronger since its inception. Billions in capital and top talent are at all-time highs. If anything, the last crash cleaned up the unsustainable, ponzi-like projects and cut all the nonsense happening during the bull market in 2021 — that extends beyond crypto by the way.
It’s easy to be bullish when everything goes up. No matter what shitcoin you bought in 2021, it went up. Does it make you a savvy investor? Tell Twitter, please.
As entertaining as it is to read these Twitter characters, you can now tell the difference between the leverage-addict crypto-bros and the missionary builders during the downturn. The builders are not only still around, but increasing every day.
Crypto is (still) inevitable. DeFi primitives like Automated Market Makers, Flash Loans, and asset issuance are here to stay. They are validated use cases. NFTs came out of nowhere as consumer digital goods, identity tokens, and more. DAOs with delegation, on-chain voting and community treasury management are pushing the boundaries of human coordination.
This is the third cycle for crypto. The third time crypto is ‘dead’. But the industry gets stronger and better with each iteration. We’re still facing many technical and regulatory challenges. But what did we expect? Is the status quo not going to push back? Yeah, we know better.
If you are keen to deep dive into what I shamelessly simplified above, check the latest Messari report here. It’s only 168 pages, but you can also listen to the podcast too.
Closing thoughts
If you take anything from this post with you, it should be this: crypto presents a great opportunity for those who are up to the challenge. The journey won’t be easy but the reward will be worth it.
Today, transition as a product manager is possible with the right strategy and attitude. You just need to put in the effort. There’s no silver bullet, I’ve only laid out what worked for me, so go ahead a create your own path and tell me about it. Leverage your own strengths.
We need more product people. The current UX leaves a lot to be desired and despite the technical limitations, we can do way better.
If you resonate with anything I said, reach out to me @davidef_7 and let’s connect.
Until next time,
David