Jason Shah: evaluation

Transcript context

…One of the most interesting and maybe surprising points you made in the post that you wrote about being a PM in Web3 is that there's much less need for a PM, especially early stage Web3, and it feels like, the stuff you're talking about feels like a PM's really helpful along these lines. So, I'm curious, are things changing at all there? Have you changed your perspective on PMs and Web3, and then I don't know, where do you see the evolution of product management and Web3? I actually am seeing things change a lot, and one thing in Web3, if one learns nothing is the ability to admit when they're wrong or when things change. And so, I think that that's exactly what I'm seeing. So, basically, I'm specifically noticing a lot of teams hiring product leaders, more product managers. Those product managers are actually now working kind of increasingly in sort of more traditional product management fashion, in addition to some of the differences that we discussed in the post around the community management and role in marketing and things like this, but specifically, Uniswap just made a big hire out of Meta. I saw that Gemini also did the same. We're seeing OpenSea hire a lot of talent along these lines too, even through the ups and downs that their business has seen, and at all levels. Whether it's kind of product manager, senior product manager, director, VP or CPO, you're seeing it across the board. And so, I think that's partially happening because you're seeing a maturation of products, right, and so, maybe you can start early with a few engineers, a community manager, get the ball rolling, but eventually the product is more mature, the complexity has grown, the role of the product manager is far more useful than they can differentiate. I also think the market is getting increasingly competitive. So, there's many NFT marketplaces. There's many Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains. As a result, I think product is always a competitive advantage, right? If it's working, it improves strategy, it improves execution, and improves team collaboration. And so, maybe that was less of a difference maker before where these teams didn't need that competitive advantage as much because maybe they launched a token and the token was mooning, and so a bunch of people were adopting the product, but that only lasts so long, and first principles still come come in to focus, whether it's one day or one month from now. So, I'm definitely seeing it shift. It's definitely making a huge, positive difference in the cases that I've observed, and my hunch is we're only going to continue to observe this because with more user adoption comes new challenges, and for all these players that are growing and getting some form of adoption, the product complexity is only going to grow, and having somebody to help lead teams, help prioritize between all the different products that they could build or strategies they could pursue is going to only increase in importance. I know we're like we're PM people talking about the value of PM, but something I find is that people that are kind of anti having a PM or don't see why they need a PM in my experience just haven't worked with a great product manager because my experience, you find a great PM, they just make everything better, and so, it's not surprising to hear what you're sharing which is people are kind of discovering that value of bringing on a product manager, even if it's mostly engineering work. And so, that's promising, and I wonder if that's just a natural evolution of a new space where people are like, "Eh, I don't need PMs in this one," and then like, "Oh, okay, well, I see. All these things aren't happening. We need someone to help. Who can do that for us? Maybe it's a PM."…

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