5. zhivkoto - Head of R&D @ LimeChain

Welcome to product3 - bringing you insights from the frontlines of web3 development.

This week we start broadening the horizon beyond product managers in order to spotlight different roles. After all, great products come from many hands working together, not just PMs. 

I’m stoked to introduce zhivkoto (@zhivkoto), Head of R&D at LimeChain (@LimeChainHQ). I had the pleasure of working alongside zhivkoto when I was starting in web3 and his guidance and insights helped shape my understanding of the space. 

As Head of R&D at a company that provides tailored technical solutions to clients like Coinbase, Solana, Hedera, and The Graph, zhivkoto can’t afford to lose sight of what’s happening in the ecosystem. On top of that, he and his team have shipped multiple dev tools such as rollup.codes and Zest. Zhivkoto is also partially responsible for BlackRock owning a CryptoDickButt NFT.

In less than 500 words, he shares:

• Strategy and decision-making 

• Evaluating partnership opportunities

• How to measure community health

• pre/post TGE product adoption

How do you factor governance, tokenomics, and community involvement into product strategy and your decision-making process?

As someone who's built products in a DAO-first way, juggling between governance, community involvement and the product vision/roadmap is extremely difficult. While community feedback is always valuable, it can often be short-sighted and profit-oriented. More often than not, I would say that it can slow a team down, particularly in the early stages. Once product-market fit is achieved and the project is on the path to sustainability, governance, and community involvement make much more sense.

How do you evaluate partnership opportunities in a rapidly changing landscape?

This question is actually much more tricky than it sounds. The simple answer would be to only engage in partnerships that have clear symbiosis however, this is not always the case in web3. Partnerships can be leveraged to cross-pollinate communities, making for a more effective GTM process. However, this is often abused as it is a standard practice for projects to abuse partnership announcements in order to drive narrative and/or token price. I'm not a big fan of that.

How do you measure community health beyond token price and trading volume?

Token price, and even more so trading volume, is not always correlated to community health. I can name a bunch of projects with not so great PA or low trading volumes but an extremely vibrant, grassroots community. How do we measure this? I would look at the engagement in Discord, Telegram, and of course CT. While engagement can be faked/botted, organic communication, memes and lore cannot. The vibes chico, they never lie.

How do you differentiate between speculation-driven engagement and genuine product adoption?

Great question, though very difficult to answer. In a world where users feel entitled to an airdrop and airdrop farming is the norm, it's very, very hard to measure organic product adoption pre-TGE. Projects are also adding fuel to the fire through engagement (points) campaigns, leading to hectic farming pre-TGE and hardcore user churn post-TGE. It's a tradeoff of short-term vs long-term, as well as quantity vs quality. I'm not trying to say that engagement campaigns should be abolished, there is place for them. However, if your product is not that great, don't get excited just because 50k "users" are farming points.

If you’ve enjoyed this micro interview, share it with fellow web3 product people and give zhivkoto a follow on X (@zhivkoto).

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

See you in the next edition!