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Project context | Solution | Process | Reflection

Blockdaemon is a blockchain infrastructure product. Imagine Amazon Web Services (AWS) got married to Stripe and sent their baby to blockchain college. That's Blockdaemon.

Blockdaemon started as a successful infrastructure product.

What Twilio did for the tech industry to text and call via API, Blockdaemon is doing to enable companies across the globe to connect to blockchains.

Infrastructure can only get you so far. When I joined Blockdaemon, we started considering expanding our product offering to become a suite of tools, like a complete blockchain OS out-of-the-box.

The opportunity: Staking

What’s staking?

Staking is a way to use your crypto holdings to earn additional rewards. Think of it as generating interest on cash savings or earning dividends on stock holdings.

The solution we designed combines a dashboard with a series of in-context workflows.

Dashboard

The dashboard enables users to get real-time staking data across all of their different Blockchain assets in one place, including current prices, balances, and gains. The dashboard lets users monitor their staking infrastructure, including servers, nodes, and other hardware and software information.

Workflows

The workflows enable users to start monitoring wallets, create new portfolios, and generate reports which can be used for tax purposes and for reporting to management and clients.

My role

I started working with Blockdaemon as a consultant through my consulting business, Gravy. 

After six months of working together, Blockdaemon acquired Gravy, and I joined the team full-time as the Director of Design. I hired and managed a team of product designers, marketing/brand designers, and user-centered researchers. 

I guided and collaborated with a lead designer on the Staking product. We worked closely with the user research team to glean insights about current and prospective customers and with the development team to ensure feasibility.

Problems/validation

1. Staking is a brand new vertical for Blockdaemon.

2. We needed to design for a brand new type of user.

3. We needed to phase out the work since it was a small team.

Research

We interviewed 10 customers and prospective customers. Of those 10, five were already involved in the crypto finance space, and five were not but were interested in dipping their toes into the space.

Research Findings

1. Customers and prospective customers needed a way to get an overview of their entire crypto portfolio.

2. Customers wanted a way to import wallet addresses in bulk (the average # of wallet addresses per customer was ~50).

3. Customers needed a way to export data for tax reporting purposes.

When building a product, getting from zero to one is incredibly challenging. Even more challenging is trying to launch your second act. Recognizing the importance of revalidating product-market fit and when to go after a new target customer base is critical.

If I were to work on a project similar to this one, I would start with product-market-fit and work more closely with a product marketing team to ensure the language, metaphors, and jobs-to-be-done are well-defined to ensure we're building product customers and users love.