16. Vadym - Product Manager and Angel Investor

Meet Vadym (@vadymnx), a product leader who's been navigating the evolving landscape of web3 since 2017. His experinece spans from Layer 2 protocols to MEV supply chains and DeFi insurance. His journey across wildly different layers of the ecosystem gives him a unique perspective on what actually works in web3 product development.

I actually met Vadym at ETHSofia in September, where he gave a talk about web3 product management. He covered topics like how pming in crypto is different, who your users really are, and how to talk to them effectively. His talk resonated with me as his takeaways aligned well with my own thinking on the importance of talking to users and how tokens can become a major distraction for products that haven't reached product-market fit yet. It was refreshing to hear someone articulate these challenges as well!

In about 500 words, Vadym shares his thoughts on:

• How pming in web3 is different

• The hidden cost of prioritization in a fast-moving space

• Metrics that actually matter (and the vanity ones to avoid)

• What the secret sauce to successful protocols

How is product management different in web3 compared to web2 based on your experience across multiple DeFi protocols and MEV infrastructure?

I think the main distinctions are threefold.

• First, most dapps are early stage, so it's more about startup culture with the goal of finding product-market fit as quickly as possible, rather than traditional product management playbooks with frameworks and systematic processes.

• Second, it's versatile and technical. Crypto has always been an interdisciplinary field, so you need at least a basic grasp of many adjacent domains and a confident understanding of blockchain fundamentals.

• Third, crypto is fast-paced and attention-driven, often solution-first rather than problem-first. The ability to distill signal from noise becomes even more critical in this environment.

What are some unique challenges you have faced in your work, and how did you tackle them?

Prioritization has always been a core PM job, but in crypto with so many shiny objects, even minor choices are investment decisions, carrying risk-reward implications and an opportunity cost.

Today there are sufficient UX building blocks to deliver great usability for any dapp. But should you add passkeys? Support a new chain? Or implement a routing optimization? Or add gas sponsorship? Becoming even slightly over-committed to one direction like NFTs, SocialFi or AI agents can be detrimental in the long run given strong competitive incentives and how trends shift overnight.

Tackling this is the PM's job by default, but in crypto it means being in the trenches - a power user of your own and competitor's apps, constantly testing new products, following discourse related to your app topics, and staying as close to your users as possible.

What metrics do you find most valuable when measuring success in web3 products?

I don't think web3 metrics differ much from web2. It's the standard ones: retention, DAU and MAU, volume, revenue, or even P/E. But not vanity metrics that can create the illusion of traction, such as community and mindshare (can be incentivized), TVL (can be rented), and token price (except in the long run).

So I'd say it's how forkable or copiable a protocol or project is, and how far such competitors can go. From this perspective, Uniswap and pump.fun are good examples of products that have proven their durability despite being open and forkable.

You've been building in the industry for a while. What patterns have you noticed about what makes a web3 product successful versus what makes it fail?

If I only knew! From what I can tell, it always comes back to fundamentals:

• doing the boring and right things consistently

• limiting distractions, even under pressure from the market, the community, or even users.

The products that succeed are the ones that resist the temptation to chase every new trend and instead focus on solving real problems well. It's not glamorous, but it works.

If you've enjoyed this micro interview, share it with fellow web3 product people and check out Vadym's work at vadymn.com.

Got a builder in mind whose wisdom we should share? Please share!

See you in the next edition!