Hi everyone! My name is Rika and I’m a Product Manager. I was previously at ConsenSys, and prior to that I worked in the blockchain lab at Deloitte. I love thinking about crypto through a product lens, specifically how can we build great products that keep users coming back. I am currently seeking to join an intellectually curious, collaborative team working on solving real-world problems. You can learn more about my background and experience in my latest Medium post: https://medium.com/@rika.sukenik6/a-call-for-support-as-i-embark-on-the-next-phase-of-my-blockchain-journey-7082c593df1f
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Hi Rika,
Great to have you here on our forum! We also are keen to look at crypto through a product lens and would love to learn your insights from your time at Deloitte and Consensys. Perhaps there’s some way we can work together. Do you have any topics that you would like to start a conversation with?
Cheers,
Nick
Nick, kudos to you for looking at crypto through a product lens! Many (crypto) startups are so focused on buidling from the onset and they completely miss the customer development process.
It seems like you’re on track with building a really powerful scalable blockchain, and are now trying to figure out what application(s) make the most sense to build on top - whether it’s gaming, geospatial imagery, ML, etc. With all of these options, how do you figure out what to focus on?
More specifically, I’m keen to understand how you’ve approached customer development - how do you segment users, how do you talk to them, how do you quickly iterate on features and get it back out to users for testing, how do you test your hypotheses? Lastly, how do all of these things come together to inform your business model?
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Thanks @rika.sukenik6, it’s a matter of necessity to look at blockchain through a product lens. While the last bout of rabid speculation supported pure technological projects without any clear use case or go to market strategy, that’s no longer viable. We need to be more strategic and targeted with our approach. So we welcome your ideas on how to tackle this most effectively!
I see customer development in two segments. Developers and enterprise. Developers need to be attracted to the platform through the community or through the features of the protocol whether that’s tooling or the underlying improved utility over competitor chains. Enterprise can be pursued more through partnerships. Developers are often building dapps from scratch and attracting users from scratch. Enterprises often have existing users and will simply leverage your blockchain to enhance their service.
Attracting both segments is tricky, but a few enterprise relationships can drive lots of traffic to the chain while attracting a developer community takes a longer time and is more of an organic process. To make it easy for developers to make the switch to Harmony, we will support solidity and EVM at the start and make the process as frictionless as possible.
As for establishing processes around segmenting users, testing features and iterating to find product market fit, we are very keen to get to that stage. This is a major driver of why we are working as hard as we can to get an MVP out there that our users can interact with so we can get feedback and iterate.
I really love your thoughtful questions about these topics @rika.sukenik6. I would love to hear your thoughts on our approaches and how we can improve. If you are in the bay area, you should come by for a visit! Also, come join us on our discord some time harmony.one/discord. We’d love to chat with you 
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Thanks, Nick! I see a lot of potential in Harmony and I love your community focus. I’ve been talking to Sahil and I plan on coming to the bbq tomorrow (will bring my fiance too!) I’m really looking forward to meeting the team and experiencing your culture first-hand.
To your point about enterprises as a customer segment, I hold a contrarian’s view. After working with enterprises at both ConsenSys and Deloitte, I think there is too much opportunity cost for a startup to partner with enterprises. It’s great for PR, but that’s about it. Most projects don’t make it past proof of concepts so you don’t actually get to reap the rewards of their user base. Check out this article from McKinsey. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/blockchains-occam-problem
Sahil and I discussed the enterprise strategy when we spoke, and I said I would capture my ideas in more detail in a document. I’m planning to send that to him shortly. Let me know if you want me to email that doc to you as well. Cheers, and hopefully I’ll see you tomorrow!
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