Blockchain PM in uncertain times...

Hi,

I hope each of you is staying well, safe and socially responsible 🙏

I haven’t sent an issue in a while. I do plan to continue sending them. The job listings feel more important than ever in these uncertain times.

This issue will include some Blockchain PM thoughts I collected over the past few weeks.

To start, I would greatly appreciate some help writing this newsletter. I’m having a hard time keeping up with it. Assistance from a volunteer or two would help get these issues back on a regular, every two week cadence.

Also, our Telegram group has over 50 members. It’s silent though. If you’d like to help manage that community, please let me know. Otherwise, please do contribute and don’t hesitate to start conversations in there. I keep an eye on it and believe others do too.

I’ve also been wondering about the perspective that project or product management is a “luxury” that crypto projects can’t afford. It’s starting to feel to me that at least some projects are starting to feel this way.

Developers are first priority. Then comes community builders. Maybe a researcher or two follow. Then maybe, just maybe, a PM gets fit into the picture.

This feels short-sighted to me. I see an effective PM as someone who increases the return on its developer spend investment.

This is a tough sell to projects though, particularly in tight financial times, as those we’re in now. Yet without a PM, the return on the developer spend investment diminishes, as inefficiency increases.

I’m thinking about this as I read Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Although I’m only working through the intro at the moment, he talks about the value of preventing problems going unrecognized.

By this he means that people who prevent problems from happening are often taken for granted, because the problem never manifests. As a result, the actions the person has taken are unrecognized and the efforts unappreciated. I feel like the work PMs do falls into this category.

So I think that’s it for now. Catch you soon, hopefully in about two weeks.