Questions

 

1. Tell us about yourself?

As pertains to this position I would say that throughout my professional career, I have been working with interdisciplinary teams and synthesizing data, public data sources, and proprietary software, to tell stories and uncover trends to help inform business decisions and policy changes. actionable goals. What I am proudest of is being able to use my transferable skills and parlay my experience into positions in different industries. I have been in the crypto world since 2016, in the capacity of investor and writer, more recently as a product manager in a DAO for a crypto payment solution. I find work in the space to be fulfilling because I find there is still a lot of room to innovate and everyone is thinking about new applications for the technology that is changing.

 

1. What project are you working on right now?

• The most pertinent project I worked on is bankless checkout which is a cryptopayment plugin, which actually leverages metamask. I was involved in the project since ideation, researching L2 chains, we released 2 features pending the third. It is not live at the moment due to substantial changes to the platform of the eCommerce site it was designed for. Based on market research, and basically just being close to the space, the biggest pain point to users is high gas fees, so we were looking for a solution that is fast and doesn’t incur high gas fees.

 

1. What was your role?

• Market research into competitors, so competitive analysis, for similar products and an inventory of the features, chains they use, etc.

• Secondary quantitative research and market trends, showed the upward trajectory of cryptopayments, and the demographics of users which allowed me to create user personas and even illustrated user payments such as expensive gas fees, and slow transactions. This substantiated the thesis we had that an L2/ sidechain would be useful.

• I also did ad hoc customer discovery interviews from within the community, by asking the target audience aimed at understanding the needs.

• I worked with the business to create the roadmap based on the revenue potential of features and their immediate needs.

• I conducted observational qualitative, open-ended interviews to test useability

• Collected user feedback through surveys and compiled it to improve the product.

• using secondary data to create user personas and finding target market

• creating user stories

• grooming dev board

• using analytics from fathom in this case,

 

1. Why do you want to work at consensys?

• Consensys is one of the leading companies in the web3 space, with a suite of interesting products.

• Metamask is one my favourite products that has played a major role in onboarding new users onto DeFi, progressively adding features.

• But I also like other products for Example quorum (QBS), because it facilitates the development of new applications by facilitating choosing and deploying ledgers. So most of the real world applications like healthcare and supply chain management of blockchain technology is becoming more possible through products like these.

• And ofc many others, like truffle a development environment, which includes automated smart contract testing.

• And frankly diligence, because in-house audits make development much easier and faster.

 

1. New features for metamask?

Well, I would imagine, since you are working towards a more seamless multi-chain user experience, making adding a network more seamless, and potentially integrating bridges. At the moment for example when I use Polygon bridge I it is a multi-step process where I would go on the polygon site. I think you guys are trying to make multi-chain, l2s and bridges included. I know you currently have currently available l2s:

1. polygon

2. arbitrum

3. optimism

side chains:

1. skale

2. xdai

any evm compatible chain, including enterprise

This is kind of one of the trends, like gnosis safe with zodiac, integrating bridges to allow DAOs to transact on multiple chains.

 

and maybe making some things default, when using the polygon bridge the user has to pick between PoS and plasma, and for the most part users want PoS, but it should PoS by default you know.

 

I also used hop protocol to send funds from gnosis custodial to bnb custodial, and this was rather problematic because the smart contract included parameters, and we missed them so now the funds are almost trapped as husdc. If the team did more research into how dao treasuries and signers work, they would have found out that there are always timing issues for signers. So maybe I would allow the uer to set the time parameter instead of a default time, or in the very least inform the user, provide alerts.

 

Truffle also for example is making it easier for developers to build on l2s and trying to make that more seamless

 

1. metamask competitors?

I think that metamask is peerless quite honest, that was my instinct, and I tried to verify that through this research, and just the functionality with connecting with dapps and the scale (22 million users) it would be hard to another product to compete. based on what I gleaned.

Because of its simplicity, availability across devices, integration with exchange and NFT websites, and support for thousands of tokens across multiple blockchains, it's easy to see why MetaMask is a popular wallet.

decentralized browser wallet

1. binance smart chain bns

2. polygon

3. avalanche
Avalanche is a blockchain platform capable of general purpose smart contract execution. It is a base layer, or layer 1 (L1) , which can connect to sidechains and support layer 2 (L2) solutions. Avalanche calls sidechains and L2s subnets.

4. cronos:
Cronos is a Layer 1 EVM Blockchain  based on the Cosmos SDK. The closest competitors to Cronos are BNB and Polygon.

5. harmony:
Harmony (ONE) blockchain is an L2  blockchain platform built on the Ethereum network, making it easier for developers to create decentralized apps (DApps).

6. fantom:
Fantom, like Ethereum, is a Layer 1 (L1) chain , allowing decentralized apps (dApps) to be built on the network. Throughout 2021, Fantom's ecosystem has helped it become a top L1 chain, as it offers a fast, reliable, and cheap (in terms of transaction fees) alternative to Ethereum.

7. eos:
L1

8. celo
Celo is a layer 1 protocol and blockchain platform, and the Celo Mainnet is entirely separate from the Ethereum network. evm compatible (EVM-compatibility means creating an EVM-like code execution environment that makes it easy for Ethereum developers to migrate smart contracts to an EVM compatible chain without having to write the code from scratch again.)
 

7. What is the difference between L2 and sidechain?

• Solutions to deal with the trilema, speed, decentralization and security. While there are a few L1 solutions being worked on like PoS and the merge, sharding (similar to distributed dbs) like Zilliqa, tezos. not mutually exclusive.

• But L2s essentially operate on top of an underlying chain to improve its efficiency and scalability.

• they shift some of the transactional burden from the base layer, making it less congested.

• this is like polygon, optimism or arbitrum, though those vary as well, for example the latter use optimsim rollups, and the former uses zk rollups, which means they vary in some of the fundamentals in how they batch and abstract data.

• side chains on the other hand, aren’t built on top of the base layer, rather parallel to it, using an independent consensus machine separate from the original layer. and security breaches do not impact the the original chain.

• these are like skale.

• So the pros are obvious, faster cheaper transactions but the cons are

 

1. What are bridges?

• ERC20 coins are native to ethereum, CEXs don’t sell native coins (coinbase), they sell tokens on the ethereum network >> so you don’t get the true coin

• to access new networks: switching native ethereum from native network to polygon network because of gas fees. (polygon was created to scale ethereum, but it doesn’t have the same security that ethereum does, because it is a bit more centralized)

• Progression: no one network can do everything, so bridges will allow more interoperability and ‘collaboration’ between networks to solve problems.

• Issues with bridges:
they’re a bit more centralized and not as secure. Each bridge has a team or entity or a company behind it
they’re bit slow: transfers take minutes, hours and even days sometimes
1. centralized
extension of some exchange?
large pools/company/person of eth tether <> polygon tether, both are tether representations on tether networks
this company sends your tether on eth to the first pool, and send you the same amount of tether on polygon for a fee paid to the centralized authority or the liquidity pool YOU MUST TRUST THAT THE CENTRAL AUTHORITY SINCE SOME TRANSACTIONS TAKE DAYS
ALSO you need enough liquidity in the second pool, which means you may have to wait for someone else to make the reverse type of transaction so that the token is available in the second pool
2. smart contract
the asset you send is frozen in a smart contract
you get a copy of that token on the new network
this is only used for coins that don’t have their own smart contract capability like (btc, btc cash and doge coin), ren BTC is on eth pegged to btc so you can lend it and interact with other dapps
 
Examples of crypto bridges:
1. xPollinate
backed by two companies NOT affiliated with companies you can bridge to, mainly created to collect fees
2. Matic bridge (now polygon bridge)
developed by polygon team to help people get on the true polygon network rather than hold matic token on eth network
3. Binance bridge
by binance company to help move people to move to the binance bsc chain
 
Issues with bridges, that it is still up to the user to do their own research and check reviews when choosing the bridge.
 
uses:
1. to move funds from one blockchain to the other
2. enable cross-chain communication
 
9. a challenge that you overcame
While working on bankless checkout, I think there was one feature that the team wanted to be added. But I really didn’t think it would a) add value to the product, b) we would have enough resources to release on top of everything else. So I help an informal workshop and tried to walk the team through the problem they were trying to solve, then discuss the feature they had in mind need to haves, nice to haves, etc. Then I had individual interviews with some members and some expressed reservations for convincing reasons. In the end, the developers and I agreed that this feature cannot be mapped back to the original objectives or vision of the product. We also agreed that it would be best to have a few well-done features rather than be a swiss knife product. I recommended to the team that perhaps this feature would require a different product and perhaps a different dev team. My motivation was to protect the developers’ time, but also to stay focused on the vision of the product.
 
1. Why did you want this role?
I really believe that it is well aligned with my background, skillset, and interests. As I mention in my resume, I have written complex queries in SQL, used python as well as google data studio, and several other tools to clean, synthesize and visualize data. I have created dashboards and worked through an iterative process of refining the analysis with decision-makers. I have been in the DAO for about a year, and it is quite meaningful because I feel like I am part of something bigger than myself. In addition, in my work I had to research L2s, I have used them, and used bridges. More importantly, I really like the product. Metamask has played a huge role in onboarding newcomers to defi and nfts. I think it the user-friendliness, so I think it would be interesting to work with the team behind it.
 
1. what does a good product analyst do
Apart from the cleat hard skills like data analysis and writing reports, etc. I think the most important quality for a product analyst is to be curious and to care about the product. From there everything becomes quite easy. I think it is important to empathize with the user, for example I am a metamask user, I user it everyday to do swaps, to connect with gnosis safe as a treasury signer, and buy nfts. So I try to think of how my experience as a user can be better and I try to substantiate my instincts either with data, studies that have been conducted, but also by trying to stay abreast of trends. What has been most useful to me is listening to others, colleagues, and friends. I have also helped new comers set up their own metamask wallets, so I can also empathize with new users and see the product through their own eyes. In addition, this is not an individual job as much as it is a team sport, so I think being a good collaborator is quite necessary. I have always worked in interdisciplinary teams and through an iterative process.
 
1. What is the first thing you do when working on a product
depends on which stage of the life cycle the product is at. In ideation I would look at:
Who are my potential customers?
What are my customers’ shopping and buying habits?
How large is my target market?
How much are potential customers willing to pay?
Who is my competition?
What are my competitors’ strengths and weaknesses?
I think you guys have a lot of data on the backend about user habits, and how they interacted with the product, I think you might also have user survey data. If I start working on this, I would spend some time with this data and try to understand trends and find patterns. I know that you have more than 21 million monthly active users of Metamask
I would be interested in looking at your KPIs
 
Net Promoter Score
Active Users as a % of Your Total User Base
Product/Feature/Channel Usage
Number of Key User Actions Per Session*
Number of Logging into Accounts
% of Users/Sessions Where the Number of Steps/Clicks Exceed the Optimal Number
Happiness – measures attitudes or satisfaction, can be collected via surveys
Engagement – user involvement
Adoption – new people using your product or feature
Retention – users who stick with your product
Task Success – covers behavioral metrics of UX e.g. effectiveness, efficiency, error rate
 
1. describe a time that you failed at work
I guess this is a half failure. But at my second job, one of the projects required a monthly report on telecom data by geographic region. and the process was not optimized. but I found a way to sort through unstructured data, just using excel at the time as a proof of concept, that made my job exponentially easier. I presented it to my superior at the time, in the hopes that it is adopted as a method by all the people working on this project. I don’t think he saw the value in it, so I guess the failure was that I couldn’t demonstrate the value of this work. My response was that I had to work in a different industry, where improving the process is actually welcome. So I honed my skills further and started making a concerted effort to think about my interests and my skillset in a way that is agnostic of industry to understand my strengths and weaknesses.
 
1. how is a product successful at launch
I would say in this context, it would be for example the number of users utilizing a new feature. But again, that goes back to your vision and goals. In this case I know that metamask’s business model relies on swaps, and the service fee. so perhaps finding a way to measure correlation between number of times this feature is utilized and the impact on the revenue. But in my opinion, a successful launch, is one where is the least amount of bugs and the least amount customer support tickets. It means that it was intuitive, it was designed well etc.
 
feature usage, abandonment rate, and a low error rate
Happiness – measures attitudes or satisfaction, can be collected via surveys
Engagement – user involvement
Adoption – new people using your product or feature
Retention – users who stick with your product
Task Success – covers behavioral metrics of UX e.g. effectiveness, efficiency, error rate
 
1. what are some KPIs that you used?
Monthly Recurring Revenue
Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Lifetime Value
In this current product some of the KPIs were number of completed transactions, number of dropped transactions.
 
1. Tell Us About One Analysis That You Are Proud Of Ever Since You Began Your Career.
I was working at a small start up, and we had enormous data sets through firebase, that included geographic locations of users. So I aggregated this by user, and there was an academic study that used geographic location to infer socio-economic background through clustering. The only issue was that the city for the proof of concept was mexico and we were missing a crucial data set. So I spoke to statistics mexico, I didn’t know spanish but I managed to acquire the data. and created a method to automatically classify customers, segment users and help the company target customers better, because inferred income level would help the company provide different level of incentives.
 
1. why polygon
polygon pos processes 65,000 TPS, at a very low cost, there are about 37000 dapps utilizing polygon, it is trusted by users and is quite secure relatively. considering that it is less secure than the L1, ethereum mainnet, and it has a native token, though which is a smaller pool of capital if we compare it to the miners who are securing the Ethereum platform
 
Arbitrum launched a fresh new chain for general access today based on their AnyTrust technology called Arbitrum Nova, which is focused on decentralized social and gaming applications (dApps)
 
The dapp ecosystem on Optimism already has established DeFi players such as Uniswap, Synthetix, Perpetual Protocol, and Aave–allowing users to engage in token swaps, derivatives trading, yield farming, and liquidity provision.
 
 
conversion rate:
Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same time period.
 
customer journey

Analytics:
behavioural analytics
customer segmentation
1. Revenue
Conversion rate and churn. customers lost/at the beginning of period
Conversion rate influences your ROI and overall bottom lin
2. Active users (for SaaS companies)
3. Customer loyalty (for Ecommerce companies)