Ryan Selkis ~ Product Development Panel

[Music] alright ladies and gentlemen we're gonna kick it off with our second or our first panel today we have a super interesting topic and a rock star group of panelists the topic for this panel is usability in bringing blockchain technology to the mainstream this is sort of one of the big questions that faces us as a ecosystem right now along with scaling is how do we make these products easy enough for your mother or your aunt to want to use a lot of great insights here with our expert panelists our moderator is Ryan selca Sam the sorry capital had it over to rent Masari capital sounds good we might have to spin up a new investing arm so i'm ryan sulcus founder of Masari were a crypto data company and here to talk this morning about UX and I learned that the title of the panel have actually changed to why your big idea will fail so we're trying to get it a little a little bit more urgency to the topic I get a great panel here we've got Sam from wire Simona from Bounty's network and then Charlie and Kate from ideas by Nature a local development and design shop right here in Denver so you know I think we agreed we wanted to kick off because people talk about product developments it's kind of a catch-all term Charlie why don't we start with just a quick definition and and how you guys explain product development to your clients and and folks that are trying to think through this hard problem of bringing their idea to an actual customer sure I hope everyone can hear me so product development I think is the is really a question about how to create a product that your customers will care about that's kind of the very simplistic way of looking at it and I think product development is this overarching umbrella that underneath it you'll have everything from product design to user experience market research testing launch basically all the stages to bring a product from concept or idea to the marketplace and beyond so it's a pretty big big term and that's probably the most simplistic way to describe thank you so that idea is my nature we're a product company that specializes in building products in the blockchain space so you have obviously all the technical considerations and I think many in the audience are very focused on the technology and think that's their great idea is a technology innovation which is this whole space and actually no one really eventful is easy that replicates what they're used to already and hopefully is something better and that's what we really the challenge we all have in this room to bring to the market is something better than we have today there's really two components here when you think about crypto there's product developments in kind of the traditional centralized company sense and then there's planning for this distributed future where many of these networks will ultimately not be controlled by a single entity Sam Europe wire it's a it's a company that provides a centralized solution Simona Bounty's polar-opposite so maybe Sam first and then Simona can kind of speak to the two different challenges of product development both in the traditional sense in interacting with this decentralized ecosystem and then actually building one of those networks yeah that's a really good question I mean for us we started very early on in the space and there I mean there weren't decentralized solutions and like we've we've seen a lot of change in the ecosystem and like more and more decentralization becoming I mean that's what we're all here to talk about today but at the end of the day there's still a lot of problems that need to be solved with decentralization for example regulation that is something that is very hard to do in a decentralized space and that's sort of why you need central some centralized entities within the decentralized space to help sort of chaperone some of these new products that are should they be regulated should they not be regulated there's a lot of questions there and that's something that we do and we helped a lot with is just helping people with regulatory problems and that's why you need some centralized services within the industry I think I think in terms of building a product and again with with Bounty's Network we went live to May 19 2017 with a product that looked or enemas but what we wanted to do is was really get that feedback and get those users onto the platform so they would tell us did that button make sense did you know with the notification that a transaction is pending was that clear enough was it not was a confusing was it not and from the perspective of building something that is easily accessible to anyone that is the biggest challenge in terms of your own boarding piece that is still one of the key problems that we have in the space but in terms of broadening access is definitely happening I mean what we've been seeing in the past and here in a half [Music] so I'm did you cover it so yeah yeah but it's it's moving in the right direction so let's talk about some of the specific the mics got louder yeah let's talk about some of the specific challenges so there it's kind of a trident process with more centralized alternatives you succeed with your customer set or you don't with decentralized networks you've got multiple constituencies to think about when you're designing these systems or you can you know scale for a little while and have some existential threats of the network and then you've got these coordination challenges if you want to upgrade how do you guys even begin to think about tackling some of those long tail challenges with some of your customers or does that not even come into play until the idea as has reached some critical mass they've developed some type of traction at what point does that switch flip in the product development cycle and the ideation process for for what challenges come next if you're going to be successful with downey's network for instance so at least from my perspective I'm very focused on user experience so what the end user sees and how the end user is experiencing the product so when you have an idea for a product you essentially have a hypothesis that this is what people want and the longer you wait to test that hypothesis with the people that are gonna use it regardless of the challenge the more expensive it will be to fix it so how you kind of tackle problems that may occur you test well what happens if the network slows down well let's try this error message let's test it with users let's see how they respond very easy and cheap to test a paper prototype but the longer you wait if you launch a product without any kind of testing all of these problems regardless of what they are become very expensive and timely to fix so how we kind of tackle that is from the discovery process from the first inkling of a nine eight of an idea you identify okay we have this this and this this might be a problem let's test it we have this idea that users may like let's test it we want to ensure that sure our mothers and aunts but also our fathers and children and brothers and grandparents can use it let's test it with them and answer your question Ryan about also you know one thing I'm a product development or product design in particular it's not gonna solve your business problems it's not meant to do that it'll solve your customers problems which will ultimately end up benefiting your business so there is the businesses strategy and it's go to market strategy and all the regulation hurdles it's gotta face a product development is really meant to focus on your product and it the experience that those customers will have but in an iterative way so as the market changes you keep iterating on that design to take account for what's happening new problems that exist that you have to resolve through design and just to add to that I mean when we Explorer in September of last year we very much based it around all of the feedback that we had gathered and you know the fact that we made it fully responsive on mobile was again one of the main reasons because the feedback that we were getting is well I'm not always gonna have my laptop and especially if you want me to complete bounties on the go especially if you know I need that same user experience that I have with web to when the apps that I have on my phone so it's very very important to iterate and continue refining it's that's key based on continuous yeah and with that I mean you mentioned it that makes sure that you design for iteration so the original question part of that was looking at Oh the etherium development changes so so quickly and if you want to keep your product up to date with the newest technology you need to make sure that when you're designing your product you're prepared to change the underlying technology that's underneath the upgrades whatever coordination is going on the network you need to be prepared for that and you need to incorporate that in the design of your product from the get-go for sure so there's kind of three challenges that we touched on for for product design in the space so you mentioned the regulatory I think there's the building on open protocols that is something not a whole lot of companies have had to deal with you know historically and and then you just have to grapple with the diversity of the user base potentially the the global nature of the user base and and the the very different needs that they might have where whereas you can I think go much much more narrow if you're just focusing on an MVP for a very specific user base for a more centralized product having some of these conversations it can get vague really really quickly I think we just set the table with like a good set of definitions and kind of like high high-level challenges but for each of those three buckets I think it'd be helpful to think of some of the projects or companies in the ecosystem right now that are doing a really good job or a really poor job and there's gonna be a bias to not crap on other projects I'd imagine so you can criticize generally if you want but praise specifically just just to put a little bit more of a tangible feel to what is good product development how of teams you think have gotten this balance right approached some of these challenges and and what can some of the folks in the room learn from that well I I think it's a little bit hard to talk about who's done it right who hasn't because we're we're seeing the rewards are a little askew there's so many so much of the foundation is fluid at this point and people are you know may have developed on one network or protocol and now realizing that maybe that might be limiting and having to think about retooling and create some inter interoperability and I think that's you know an ideas by nature that the benefit that we have is a product development agency is that we have companies coming to us that are usually have a new idea they want to bring to market and so we get to look at the snapshot of what's happening or the technology at this moment but then design through a product roadmap for flex being a take advantage of the flexibility you know what's what's coming so changes constant constant changes beyond but so I can't really speak to larger companies I mean you have direct experience in 2017 and those challenges you face I think our brand and as well on your guys side anything it's been in the market for a while has seen so many changes you've had to adapt quickly and I think it or iteration is the key not not to hit on that too too hard a point but that's that is a key piece well that goes to the building on open protocols comment so I would actually argue that you probably can find teams companies that have been intentionally flexible in terms of where they ultimately build in the future because they're not necessarily wed to say a theorem theorem 2.0 is it's a completely new blockchain right so I think some of the teams that are building on a theorem right now but that have preserved flexibility to move over to something like cosmos or polka-dot or even AOS I think that's part of that's an intentional product design decision on the part of those teams to not wet themselves too early to any underlying protocol I know I think that people across the space are sort of doing that most people are most a lot of projects don't want to commit to a specific protocol or specific stack because we I mean we're in 2019 now if you look at three years ago four years ago aetherium was barely a thing and if if you were to plan to build for what we're the stage we're at right now I mean you wouldn't be able to so I think that that flexibility in the product design is sort of I mean that that's by design so that as the technology changes they can they don't have to commit to a single technology long-term and this is the main thing I think we're we're all after this access to this new and very much we were having a conversation just before a human stage and having this interoperability and broadening access is very very important if we want this signal to take to take off I mean when we created the sounder Bounty's protocol we were very much about this whole idea of interoperability and we wanted every single platform that has boundaries as a tool to be interoperable with every other so this idea of being flexible and being open and and allowing for that access is is key in my opinion to adopt yeah and I think what's also interesting is that when we talk about building the right kind of team flexibility sure where we're working with the technology that is a moving sand dune but I think it's also important to remember you mentioned that third bucket a global audience is that if you build a product that's not made for people it will not succeed so when you are trying to address a global audience you need to really think it's like do I want everyone to use this or do I want a specific kind of person to use it because if you start building a product for everyone you're gonna it you may as well try to boil the ocean very few products out there are aimed at every single person on this planet so while you're well you and it it's like trying to balance yourself on a knife's edge you have to balance a team that's flexible enough to deal with the technology that changes every day with regulations that maybe out of your control but also remember you are building a product for people in the end there is a person at the end of your product using it to achieve a goal and unless you meet their needs no matter how great your product is no matter how great it has solved some technical tricks it won't succeed this is priority number one for any startup - to get product mark right it doesn't matter what stack it's built on if no one wants to use it I think that's that's one of the criticisms that a lot of people had against many crypto projects particularly in the bubble a lot of really cool tech no utility no no buyers no users we're starting to see that change and part of that's just a function of time but but let's think about some of the products that have had some semblance of product market fit so crowdsource fundraising pretty hard to argue that I SEOs were not a killer app for aetherium I think what makers doing now very interesting that whole decentralized finance stack is growing by leaps and bounds what we're seeing with prediction markets you're seeing the kind of early product market fit so that's table stakes right and it should be I think obvious to hopefully you know mostly young entrepreneurs in this room built something that people actually want how would you rank order the next most challenging product development decisions that some of these teams need to make so I rattled off a few you got to think about scaling you gotta think about interoperability the regulatory consequences do you guys see like the the the kind of glaring next biggest issue besides just finding product market fit I think in for me it's not just product market fit it's it's ensuring a product that is accessible to everyone because right now we have a lot of mobile wallets out there that are perfect if you're a fully functioning fully capable both cognitively and physically human being but if you have any kind of challenge in your life they're unusable so not only do we have to build a product you have to then start to account for people that face different challenges in their lives and it's not just challenges it's people that may not speak English it's people that you know may have different motivations it's people that may value ease-of-use over security it's the next big glaring problem is not just a market fit but addressing the very human nature of people and meeting those needs while still keeping true to the ethos of the blockchain yeah and again just the the example the the we were chatting about with our bounties for the oceans we did a pilot in Manila where we incentivize people to clean up this Beach and rewarded them with and I we really went into that one and went well let's see what happens if we do this and it was an incredible experience because we had 224 people turn up across two days we were doing a couple of hours of cleanup over a weekend and out of those 224 people only 10% had smart phones and out of those guys 1% had jailbroken phones and they couldn't download anything from the app stores and the only wallet that was available was trust wallet and we didn't have any internet so we had to hotspot them offer up our own phones and then download the app and then seed them with e4 gaps and then let them complete the bounty whilst explaining to them what it was and why this was maybe a new way and a new means of income for them keeping in mind that these guys were from - just traditional fishing communities and they were seeing fish stocks depleted they weren't really making the money that they used to make because they just and you bring up a really good point which is you know we are so focused on the future what's coming next what's happening we've got so many problems to solve right now I mean right here you know we're standing in the States and we're designing for other people in different communities the fact that these guys are playing at paying on a mobile phone per in it and we're thinking oh we're gonna have these long drawn-out engagements of five minutes you're interacting with an app sorry it's not gonna happen in a third-world country there's plenty of problems I mean one of the big areas I think we have to address is private key management on mobile phones and no one will be a custodian of private keys and and so that's a big we got to solve things like that so that these things so these applications that are coming online just have an easier way of handling what is already a basic behavior around email and security there's a lot of ways we need to solve those tactical issues in it and once we've solved those then I think it's gonna be then it then it's like okay what's the platform doing now were these larger tech currents that we have to stay abreast of I think we could go round-robin for the rest of the day and talk about all the things that are missing a lot of things that are missing or so obvious just because it's so early this is gonna take 10 15 20 years to actually you know get built out a lot of this infrastructure and then you know a lot of the applications in terms of what's working right now right the building blocks that people can leverage what's interesting about this whole economy all of the underlying tech is open-source so anybody hypothetically can fork it build themselves you know a new really interesting business on top of those protocols and that's all product and marketing right there there's there's very little technical innovation you could argue that some of these teams need to grapple with because they can just leverage everything that's already underpinning these systems so in terms of the building blocks that have already been built and brought to market and battle-tested a little bit where have you seen products that have just blown you away right so III want to give like the audience some like tangible case studies that they can look at and say we should be trying to emulate XYZ project as we go to market and start with this very narrow use case that sits on top of this specific protocol that we know works that's been tested in these alpha settings and that we can really put a wrapper around and blow up with this one very specific use case is kind of like that the narrow wedge to get to a bigger market opportunity make her down and die that was a huge problem like Bitcoin aetherium going up and down up and down up and down stable coins I mean the stable points before died where IOU tokens who knows if there's actually money is sitting in a bank account that correlates to those tokens maker and I have provided a fantastic technology solution to that problem and that's something that I think a lot of people should look at look at what they're doing there and leverage it because that is an example of a project that it solves specific problems like like I said the the volatility that Bitcoin and theorem have and it enables developers to use stable coins in a way and that's I mean you can have a dollar in the blockchain now or effectively a dollar in the blockchain you couldn't have that before before it's stable coins exists it and so have a secure stable coin is I mean that's what we need it's a perfect example of like the building blocks right because you think about all the other applications that more recently have started the leverage die and that architecture so I'd love to hear from you guys other examples yeah it's hard for me to come up with an example cuz I'm kind of perpetually dissatisfied as a designer I just I just look around ago none of the above was not a mantra' I'm gonna hold you to this one yeah it's financial products I feel like that's a super crowded noisy space and the differences between financial product X&Y is so nuanced this is where service design comes in it's like if you have two coffee shops sitting next to each other why do you go into coffee shop a versus coffee shop B it's because the service experience is different so those are really finer minor nuances when I'm more interested in is how smart contracts are enabling certain services that we've come to expect where like in law or real estate or energy and we're building some of those products the idea is by nature with our clients that's where it gets interesting with the people don't even need to know this is powered by blockchain they're more like oh I don't have to use a lawyer for this that's huge and so our responsibility then is to create something it's a really great experience around that yeah Kate I'm gonna give Charlie a pass only because you guys are colleagues but now you're on the hook with coming up with something that's actually tangible and specific who's doing good work again my focus is user experience so what is going to be the best in block to me is the one that's the most user friendly and with a caveat crypto kitties why do I think this is an important thing to look at it was incredibly popular and incredibly simple with as long as you could teach and this is the caveat as long as you could teach someone to use meta masks using the site was a breeze if you loved the blockchain this was awesome for you if you loved cats also awesome for you it was visually impressive it was fun it was cute and there was a tangible thing in the end that you owned and it did not matter if you cared about the blockchain you could get the same love and you know just a wonderful experience out of this and I will say that's a good example of the blockchain product I like I would also encourage people to look at other products you like in life do you like the way your refrigerator works what can you learn from that do you like the way a specific app on your phone works what can you learn from that and how can you bring that great experience to the blockchain that would be I guess my challenge and I think I mean I'm gonna be a little bit biased on this because I've seen it happening with our product and using incentives to get people into the space without the need for them to have a technical background or an in-depth understanding of what blockchain is one of the things with the bounties for the oceans and actually the very first bounty for this cleanup was created with maker it was so many of the people who fulfilled that it was their very first interaction with a dad and people fulfilled it because it was interesting because they were passionate about the environment and yes they went through the steps to download a wallet get to meet and so on but the feedback was I really wanted to do that and it was great and I got my kid to do it and I created this was actually really cool um they created a wallet for their kid and then they went and did the cleanup and so on and it's this engaging learn-by-doing thing that that I think is is key in terms of a practical way of learning so I think I'm gonna ask one more question and I'm not sure are we up until 10:00 10:15 okay so one more questions as we are to hackathon Charlie I'm glad you brought up the perpetually dissatisfied comments which I think it's probably common for a lot of high-level product thinkers that you know very aspirational folks this weekend are going to be building MVPs at best those are gonna be the winning teams that build some type of MVP what what advice do you give to folks when they're trying to get the most basic version of their service or application out the door so that they're not totally glossing over product developments and and and design and they are thinking about the actual end users and it's not you know completely foreign to for anybody to use or play around with how do they get to the the most basic application in the shortest amount of time so that they have at least a foundation to build the more aspirational product I would say just briefly great respect to people that can build a product in a weekend I know I think I could not pick one thing and do it very well if your product and this weekend can do one thing and it's easy to use and it's easy to see that is worth a thousand times more than a product that is trying to do 500 different things pick one idea focus on that idea make that idea work yeah I think it all comes down to that is like just figure out what you want to do and don't worry about the details just focus on the one thing and deliver that and make sure that it's clear you know what it is and you can communicate it well and if you have that then you've got a good project and so just to repeat that you guys just took my thunder I have no idea what to say now but I would just say when people say we'll focus on one thing that's let's decipher that a little bit more which is take one user task that's it the red path the red path is the most highly valued path that if it didn't exist you wouldn't be able to describe the benefit of this idea that's it the red path yeah agreed I mean it's it's one of those things that I night having been on the eighth global circuit for the past so throughout 2018 it is that focus picking one problem one target audience and going okay how do we solve this and if you don't you will die just to wrap up the theme of the panel good luck Thanks right thank you all for coming out early in the day