Building a Product Operations Machine

Recently, I spoke with Timothy James from Juicebox on how he helped the team revamp their product, think through their product positioning strategy and building a marketing machine that’s consistent and in-line with what product/engineering is doing. What I loved about this conversation was how he thinks about integrating the entire business together to create a well-oiled machine that harmoniously ties in with everything. If you’re building anything in the space I’m sure you’ll learn some amazing gems from this podcast.

The focus is strictly around product, growth and building in the trenches. No introductions, no fluff, no highlight reals. From 7:16 we go deeper into some of the more detailed challenges around growth.

0:00:01

Speaker #1

Sweet. Well, we’d love to know a bit more about like, what Juice Box is and how you got involved very briefly.

0:00:09

Speaker #2

Yeah, cool. So look, Juice box is a it’s a essentially an on chain funding solution right there. You you know they they kind of sit between treasury management and and fundraising. But I kind of I got involved actually not not too long ago. They’ve been around for quite some time and they probably had some quite significant projects you know constitution down signs down and down. Think about 7:00 or 8:00 projects over 1000 ETH raised so pretty substantial.

Probably nowadays about 32 and a half million US or something which you know would have been a lot more when ETH was a bit better, but I kind of got involved call it three months ago or so when the the front end team had kind of separated into a sub DAO.

And that were working really, really well and I was shipping things frequently but they lacked a bit of direction in terms of you know overarching strategy, what’s the vision, where we heading, you know what’s the road map. And it worked with a couple of them on an individual basis before they kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said hey look, you know we’re working well together. We’re just not very coordinated. Can you help? And so I kind of came in and and have been putting a pieces together for that.

0:01:28

Speaker #1

Cool. And so I’ve kind of like seen the evolution of like the Juice Box site and like how that product’s been evolving. Would love to learn a bit more about how you kind of thought about the product is like the first kind of piece and then later on touching on about growth. But let’s start a product and like how did you think about the market the way like the Valley proposition and things around that when assessing the currency of the product?

0:01:52

Speaker #2

Yeah. So when I first came in, look the the homepage had a had a banana smoking a bong and and you know they they had raised something like $173 million total US through the platform. And I thought fuck me that’s it like you know some impressive statistics there given the immaturity of the product and I immediately saw the opportunity right there. I guess the value space that they were sitting in was like I said fundraising and more recently they built out like you know. All these suites of this, this suite of treasury management tools which I you know you complement each other really, really well. But the IT just had so much potential to you know grow up a little bit and just move into a bit more of a intentional position and capture the hearts of minds of you know much broader audience. And so I saw that immediately as a massive, massive opportunity. You know some of the more immediate changes I’ve made have been.

Relatively cosmetic and infrastructure based, but it’s been OK. Well, how do we take this product that’s got an incredible early traction and done some significant volume and then actually commercialize it a little bit more. And I think, you know that’s a funny word using it in web, the Web 3 space like I feel like kind of like Oh no, no, don’t don’t say that. But to an to an extent like you know put it in the leagues of the, the coin bases and the.

In the polygons of the world and you know actually have a little bit of reliability, trust and and significance to the product.

0:03:28

Speaker #1

Sure. One thing I’ve talked about in like previous blog, blog post is about like this idea of like web three growth becoming a thing because the industry is maturing from like early engineers to like a more like business centric view. So I like I love to touch on that word commercialization, what you think it means, why you think it’s like a bit bad and why you think it shouldn’t be bad.

0:03:47

Speaker #2

That’s a that’s such a good and important topic to speak about. So I think that like the industry has been the industry’s full of trailblazers, right? Like you know these these these entrepreneurs that have you know spearheaded this new industry, found opportunities in it and do so in, in the in a very kind of left of field approach, right. And that means that I guess personality wise. These guys act different, right? You know they they kind of they go to the bit of their own drum which means a lot of shit doesn’t make sense. But put them in the category of indie hackers and they’ll kind of just do whatever they they deem fit and and they do a really good job of doing. So that’s ends why they’re the early adopters and trailbasers of movement but as the industry has gotten more and more recognition and momentum and.

And praise, you know, we’ve moved into this, into this part of the industry which we should be talking about the commercialization, we should be talking about growth. We should be talking about, you know, strategies and moving out of that kind of indie hacker basement vibes into, OK, well, you know, how do we run and scale this thing? How do we intentionally grow? And I guess that’s where juice boxes at the moment, right? It’s kind of ran by a group of indie hackers that did a fantastic job and now it’s like, OK, well, how do we make this? The real thing that has longevity and you know growth in the market so that we can continue building this, this incredible product, right. And when I think about commercialization in product, I think you know in the web two world we kind of talk about DevOps as a thing, but I think there’s a there’s a step above that which is product operations and I personally like to talk about product as an encompassing.

A group of people which has, you know developers, designers, product managers and even marketing. I think marketing is a really, really important piece to put in there. And then it’s like okay, well, how do you create coordination of these people to create truly excellent product operations that you have projects that are working on a road map and then there’s there is kind of like a growth function in there, a marketing function and like you’re all intentionally working towards the same goal with.

Different departments and different levels of coordination on the same features. You know that in itself. If you get that right, you can turn that into a channel of growth like you do not need.

You know other marketing channels you do not need initiatives like you can turn product and shipping product into its own channel that achieves a significant level of growth with coordinated operations. And so that’s where we’re marching towards at the moment.

0:06:43

Speaker #1

Cool. I’d love to learn a bit more about that around like how you think about turning product offs into marketing. Because I think typically in the crypto space, you think about marketing, you think about, well, how do we get the hottest influencer on Twitter? How do we like, do an AirDrop or some variation of that kind of thinking, right? How do we get a partnership with some big brand they can show us for like 5 seconds on Twitter? So, like, I’d love to learn a bit more about. How you see like product OPS being its own marketing channel itself, because I think that could be a lot of value to people that might be listening in here.

0:07:16

Speaker #2

So let’s think, let’s, let’s take a step back and we think about, you know, developers or you know, developing products and we think, you know, you’ve kind of got in the most basic sense, you’ve got a designer designing something and then you’ve got a developer building something and then ship it, right. Usually have a couple of different environments and you test these things and you push it. It’s relatively isolated. Group right within a company, quote, UN quote. Company function. Right. But what I’m talking about here is in like, you know, plugging in a whole bunch of different skills and streams so that you turn it into an intentional stream of growth, right? And you gotta think about let’s take an empathetic view of how people work. People work people. The things that the ways that things grow is that they trust them and they’re reliable, right. And.

It’s delivering value. Now you know you can think of building a product and it delivers value. But if you’ve got no means in getting in front of a customer, it’s never gonna grow. And if you are not reliable, then they’re just gonna walk away, they’re gonna churn and if you are not trustworthy again, similarly they’re gonna churn. And so when I talk about these product operations and turning product into a channel of growth, I mean you’ve got.

You’ve got a road map you’re working towards, which is an intentional strategic position, eg where we are here now and we want to get here in 12 months time, right, in that we’ve got a bunch of projects, right? We’ve got a number of different projects or milestones that we’re working towards.

And a loose timeline, right. And so when we kick off a project, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got growth marketers in the team, we’ve got developers in the team, we’ve got designers in the team and then we’ve got product managers in the team, right. And so the product managers coordinate essentially the team or the skilled efforts, you know.

The product market is they develop materials which are pre launch, post launch and launch materials that go towards you know different different channels or streams of growth. You know you’re looking at your, your podcasts, your emails, your Twitter, your all of these different channels in which are used to reach customers in a coordinated effort that is predictable and consistent. So for example what we’re doing at the moment is playing around with a bunch.

Of the pre launch and the launch materials for product marketing reduce box when we launch a project so that we’re building pipe and then we’re pushing that feature product or project out through various different channels on a consistent basis, whether that might be a blog post, whether that might be a combination of.

You know, newsletter, Twitter, podcast, what viewers can start to understand is consistency, right? And you know they start following the same way that you. You know you do this with your your podcast, you, you.

Deliver value consistently on one day of a week, every single week, right. And so visitors come back more and more and more to get more and more and more. Similarly with the product operations, you have consistent channels on a frequent basis in which you are doing predictable.

You are pushing predictable materials and what better way to, you know what, what better method to do that with shipping things, right. We’re shipping things constantly and we can turn that into a channel of growth. So that’s what I kind of mean when I talk about that.

0:10:44

Speaker #1

Sure. And like when you talk about predict about like predictable content sometimes like things take longer to ship or they’re not fully shipped like how do you marry the two of like the fact that? You never know when a product’s actually gonna ship and bouncing off with like predictable content.

0:11:00

Speaker #2

Yeah. So that that’s a is a good question. Um. And it’s, you know, it’s an impossible task to figure out when things are gonna be done, but um. We’ve seemed to find a really good shipping schedule around town hall, right. And a town a town hall is our you know weekly internal meetings in which we you know give a company wide. I keep saying the word company but you know we give it a down, a down wide announcements of kind of what’s been done and and what’s going to get done and so.

That it’s, it’s a very simple change, but creating a shipping schedule around town hall which we do on a Wednesday means that we either are going to hit it this Wednesday or we’re going to hit it next Wednesday, right. And you can know days prior on the Monday how close you are to that that timeline. So the way that the way that in which I manage it as as kind of like a a product guy is that we define an initial scope which is very, very loose.

Right. And you essentially just put like I usually try and do it in 15 or 30 day increments or 7 to 30 day increments. And then you never say, you know it’s gonna launch on this day that’s kind of like this week, right, or this increment. And then you, you kind of get to that increment and then you are getting, so you’ve got let’s say number of different phases, you’ve got your, your exploration phase, you got your design phase, your development phase, your kind of testing phase, your launch phase once we get to that.

And over from design to dev, the start becomes much clearer and tighter in which your estimation can get much better. Now once you’re going from that development phase, that testing phase, you’ve got a really certain time on them when you’re going to ship. And then so we’ll coordinate that around the town hall and if we’re not ready and it’s Tuesday, then we will push it to the next one for example. And so that that shipping schedule around one day a week has been really, really beneficial for us just even with pain alignment and management like.

It’s been fantastic. Little I. It was so unintentional as well. Like, I did not mean for that to happen, but it just kind of like just developed among the team that I’ve got.

0:13:08

Speaker #1

Nice. And how do you think about the pre launch material, the launch material on the post launch material, like how do you keep it engaging different, interesting like because like the content is we shipped X, but how do you basically hype up the fact that we shipped X before you ship it and then how do you? Continue to talk about once you’ve shipped it as well.

0:13:29

Speaker #2

Yeah. So we’ve got a number of different channels in which we use strategically. So the pre launch and by the way this is all very new. So we’re still going through that kind of testing and learning phase where we’re figuring out what works for Juice Box in particular. But the pre launch is a subset of the channels and it’s all about, you know, it’s all about hyping it up and this thing is coming right. A lot of the time what’s coming is based upon user feedback and so you’re gonna get a a a certain level engagement anyway or someone’s been waiting for. And that’s just a constant. This thing’s coming, this thing’s coming, this thing’s coming, right? Not a lot of ambiguity. Use a lot of ambiguity in the pre launch materials. Now in the launch materials, you see a heaviest bit, right? And you’re trying to push out all of the different channels and then this is where you really let your.

Product marketing or visibility team Shine and let them take the initiative, right. I think one of the initiatives that we’ve been playing with at the moment is like you know we’re about to launch kind of like a a new about page and you know try and bring some of the customers or the the users along on the journey. And so you know do we play with an AirDrop on top of all of what we’re doing, right? Do we say that you know relevant different success milestones of juice box, do we AirDrop you know these to customers? Or do we add JVX to customers that they’re all users of Juice Box and is that a way to launch the new feature on top of the predictable channels in which we already use?

0:14:59

Speaker #1

That makes sense. And then so like you kind of got all that locked down. And then in terms of the material you’re posting out, is that the same as how you think about growth or is growth different? From that predictable marketing machine that you’ve created around product.

0:15:17

Speaker #2

Yes and no. I think that you have to have an engine and the engine has to be predictable as you know. You know it’s kind of like over a long term this is what we’re going to get to in terms of or this is our targets in terms of growth and this is going to be a slow moving machine that compounds its effort over time, right. And we do that using predictability. Now you’ve also got. And which is also crucial is your initiative see marketing issues, you know your growth hacking campaigns like what can we do that’s scrappy and you know crazy idea and experiment that we can put on top of this engine to Fast forward that growth. And I think it’s incredibly important to do so. But I wouldn’t be doing well. It depends what stage of of product that you have, but I would now down the engine before you start doing some of these scrappy.

Scrappy campaigns, at least scrappy marketing initiatives, right? Usually when you first start something can you like you know you’ve just launched it and it’s like just you, it’s just you and a friend, like the scrapping issues are great. But then once you start to mature, the operations get straight back on to building that engine, then get back onto the scrappy marketing initiative.

0:16:28

Speaker #1

How do you think about those, like scrappy marketing issues? Because I feel like that’s what everyone’s thinking about when they think about marketing and how do we grow? Yeah, is are there any which you guys have found have worked well or a process of how you come about them or it’s really just sit down, come with something crazy and try it out?

0:16:46

Speaker #2

Yeah, look, it’s definitely like this is where you encourage creativity. And I don’t think there’s like a I don’t think that you’ve got a framework to work within. And I don’t think there’s a, you know, predictable process for it. I think it’s a matter of OK, like. It’s it’s a, it’s a context based, right. We’re shipping new website. What do we do? Like at the moment, like you guys will see, but Juice Box is about to ship like an entire new website. We’ve just done like a big brand refresh. We’re resking the website and now we’re about to ship. It will happen Friday morning, we’ll ship a brand new website and there’s a couple of Easter eggs in there, right. And so we’ll run a campaign around the Easter eggs, you know, a couple of.

Like a couple of Twitter posts and whatnot of people like, you know, to engage them and find these tricks. And that’s like on top of the marketing engine or the product marketing engine in which we’ve kind of started building. And I think those are incredibly important. It’s context based like you know, no ideas in these sense of bad ones. It’s more or less like get your team together and have a chat like what can you do? What’s what’s, what’s fun as well, like what’s fun is really important with these scrappy.

Product marketing campaigns, like, I think really this is where you can kind of break out of the the routine and go, OK, well, what can we do that’s different, That’s fine. Experimental, like we don’t really care if it doesn’t work, but we’re going to do it anyway. Sure.

0:18:12

Speaker #1

What’s the most fun you feel like you’ve had on a campaign like that recently or like in your career?

0:18:18

Speaker #2

Look there’s not one on Juice Box because I’m, I’m relatively new. I think I’m only three or four months in. But there’s been some fun ones that I’ve done at, you know previous companies and companies that I’ve launched in the Web 2 space. Some particularly fun ones with influences and you know using social media and and Ted Talk and and it’s very real to to really highlight the product and there’s one that we that I did for a social media startup, quite some. Time ago with with Pokémon Go when Pokémon Go was like that was that huge huge trend that we kind of did like the types of influences got to catch them all and like really cliche the shit out of them and that like you know got a ton of engagement and and was a lot of fun to kind of film and do and and it was really like we kept because the we were data-driven influencer marketing platform, right And and you have like a specific characteristic and profile with kind of data around it So like we use that same.

Layout of the UI to like, you know, put it up against these kind of like Pokémon Go characters, which were influences and super cliche kind of probably bit disrespectful as well, but you gotta go, you gotta go to those lengths.

0:19:32

Speaker #1

That’s amazing actually. On the topic of channels, like everyone kind of looks to Twitter as a channel when it comes to like curb their audiences. Do you think there are other channels that are underutilized or people should be thinking about like. I know LinkedIn is frowned down upon, but the reality is, like a lot of people who are quite deep in Web 2 coming into Web three are predominantly there. So how do you think about channels? Networks like audiences more broadly speaking?

0:19:56

Speaker #2

Yeah, man, that’s a really, it’s a really good thing to chat about because like. One of the biggest challenges that I’ve found in the Web 3 space, and I’m relatively new to it, I picked it up pretty quickly. It kind of dabbled in it for a while, but I’ve called myself like one of those like fence sitters, right. I’m like a like an early adult or entrepreneur that’s always some of the fence and like ran towards challenges. But I’ve been more recently got into Web three and what the biggest problem that I kind of found in Web Three is like that privacy and identification and make it hard to market really, really well. But I didn’t like web two you got like you got.

Endless amounts of data, endless amounts of, you know, deanonymized data as well. And and you can use that to market and personalize the shit out of your product as well as your marketing campaigns and reach the right people. But it’s just a lot harder to do that in the Web 3 space, right? The way that I’ve kind of attacked and solved this problem is trying to bring the best of Web two world into the best of web three world. And so recently we’ve kind of launched.

Wallet link the profiles. And so when you connect your wallet, you can kind of like bulk out your profile and you can get product announcements if you add in your e-mail and it’s still, you know, somewhat anonymized and the privacy is all there. But we can do so through, you know, your Adm marketing or even just like your notifications e.g. when someone pays your project or when you launch a project and you know these sorts of traditional.

Marketing channels or communication channels, which are like familiar mental models and super prominent on Web 2 but just not on Web Three. And I think that they’re like totally underutilized and like when you talk to a Web Three founder or someone in the Web Three, like they’re like so hard to the Web 3 enthusiast. So I’d really like, oh, no, you can’t do that. Like e-mail, like, no e-mail, like ProtonMail, like, you know what I mean? Like they’re so hard down that.

Area that they forget that there’s still an opportunity there and you can still have the best of both worlds and but you don’t have to be like you know there’s a bit of a balance like you don’t have to be so far one way. And so yeah we’ve I’ve just tried to start to bring in some of the best principles from product growth in the web two world and start to bring them over to web three and start to kind of combine them to still get the benefit of like web three community which is the most fantastic part about.

Building on building a Web three and then but still use some of the traditional growth mechanisms that we know and love in Web 2.

0:22:31

Speaker #1

Completely. You touched a bit about data earlier on like how we thought about using data. There’s like on chain or off chain to like help inform or guide the product because it’s I think like using data is still also like one of those things around like user privacy and whatnot like there is on chain analytics, but that only gets you so far. So yeah, we’d love to learn a bit more about that.

0:22:52

Speaker #2

Yes. So I’m with data, I’m a little bit different. Like I, I very much use data on like a project level rather than a product level. So I will, for example, like you know, I’ve got my road map. This is where we are. This is where we want to go. Here’s like 12 projects inside of it. Now each project has kind of like a PRD. This is like what we want to achieve with the product and here’s some like success metrics, right. And so as part of that project. Scope, we have to be tracking the baseline and then we have to be tracking, you know, at the start of the project, what do we, you know, what do we get in terms of analytics, what are we working with? And then once we ship it, you know what’s our success metrics and you know what’s our timeline on success metrics as well. Let’s say it’s like you know, two months after launching it and part of the project is like event tracking.

Important part, you know, let’s set that up and then let’s measure it at the end of that project or the timeline after the end of the project and that tells you how effective your project and or product or feature is. And now that’s the best way I like to use data. There is also a place, a time and a place for dashboards, but I think that they’re kind of like lots of people don’t know why they’re looking at dashboards.

0:24:11

Speaker #1

Like I.

0:24:11

Speaker #2

I reckon that that’s like like ohh, we need this dashboard and we need to be like looking at the users. Like you know, why like do you know? Do you even know why you’re looking at them? Do you even know why you’re looking at your your turn right. Do you even know why you’re looking at your, you know, users that land on that page. You even know why you’re looking at users that sign up like like lots of this shit’s vanity metrics and you know they don’t know why and they end up putting this effort into building our analytics and building our dashboards and then they’re like, ohh. What do I do with it now, you know and so I think that for me anyway analytics at a project level is really, really helpful. And then there’s a there is a place for a dashboard at a product level, but it’s more so to check in periodically, right. So you know we’re measuring it, we’re measuring at a project level and then once we get to a product level, it’s like you’re checking in once a month or you know you know once, once a once a quarter or whatever it is to see.

How at a big picture level you needle has been moved, but you need to be intentional with that. Like every single time I will build dashboard, like it’s probably after I’ve done a number of different projects with the team. You know we found out pace, we found out capacity in the way that we work, we’ve gotten some stuff out and then we start to measure some stuff as well. And then we’re like all right now we’ll start looking at it in like.

You know a completely high level from a high level perspective, but be intentionally that it’s not like hey, what do you want to see? What do you want to track? Why do you want to track it? Where’s it going to get you like what what decisions that going to help you inform. These are things you kind of got to think about when when pulling something together.

0:25:56

Speaker #1

Yeah. When you said why, like why are you looking at some of like churn or retention, like what do you think the right answer? Usually is And what do you think the wrong approach is when it comes to looking at dashboards?

0:26:10

Speaker #2

Look, I don’t think that there’s a right or wrong necessarily. I think there’s a right or wrong in context of what you are trying to achieve. So for example, like let’s take Juice Box where like our goal is longevity. You want to keep going, keep building this amazing product. So we’ve got some kind of like statistical goals, but obviously the most important thing is. Projects, new projects and project contributions because that results in fees, which results here in, you know, people keeping keeping jobs. And so churn is ridiculously important to look at in terms of like are we hitting fees and like churn for us is like who’s who’s kind of like come on and not raise the money. I call like I I can kind of consider that churn rather than the traditional churn like leaving the platform because it’s not kind of like that. That doesn’t really happen. It’s more like.

They’ve started something and then it’s gone nowhere and definitions can change, right? And so I think that when I’m looking at the overarching goal on like increasing the fees or the treasury and the fees is like.

Then it’s important to look at things like churn and find out where the drop off is and find out why they’re not. The individual creators aren’t achieving their goals. And you know to look at the project count and the contribution count, but they’re all banded metrics if we don’t look at the contribution size, right? So it’s like these things just pair together.

0:27:35

Speaker #1

Sure. No, that’s a really, really like nice way of looking at it. Yeah, I mean I think that’s like we’ve covered like pretty good ground in the time that we have. Is there anything else that like you wanna add in or I guess like put out there given like the experience you’ve had and kind of what you’ve observed in Web three so far?

0:27:53

Speaker #2

Yeah. So there’s been like an interesting and that’s I wouldn’t say that it’s fully developed yet, but I’m kind of like developing I guess this this model which. I think could work. That’s still a little bit to go. Like I said, I’m kind of like still making the transition very much at the moment. But like when building for Web Three, I’m trying to find a balance between building for Web 3 enthusiasts, which you know cover a lot of the product users at the moment. And then also like attracting defense sitters like those kind of people that are like just ready to make that leap in the Web Two and then also like.

Educating the masses, right, Because I think that’s one of the biggest challenges of Web Three. It’s like we’ve got such great technology and incredible people building and incredible talent, but we make things so fucking complicated.

Like, so complicated, man. Like if you put that in front of, I like the term that they use normies. It’s just like they don’t understand that shit, right? And so I’m kind of like putting together this model. It’s like build the Web 3 enthusiasts market to the fence fitters and educate to the normies.

You know, aka like you know, the functions are for Web 3 enthusiasts. The design and marketing is for the people that sit on the fence between those two groups and the copying. The documentation is for the moments, right? And you kind of are covering the breadth of the audiences in which you need to in the areas that are important.

So I think that’s like something to think about. I’m not like, I’m not, I haven’t like totally validated it at all. But it’s like kind of something that I’m playing with and working towards is like really, really simplified copy, you know, balanced design and marketing and then like you know, more advanced functions.

0:29:45

Speaker #1

I really love that framework and when you have it ready, I mean like the keen to share it or we can like have you want to talk about it again.

0:29:53

Speaker #2

Yeah, look, I hopefully it works out and I come back and I’m like, Yup, I’ve got it. You know, Juice Box gets incredible traction and I can, I can order to offer that. But yeah, no, it’s definitely still developing and it’s something that I’ve kind of just like validating as I go. I’ve been making kind of tweaks here and there and yeah, we’ll see, we’ll see.

0:30:12

Speaker #1

Too easy? Well, thanks a lot Tim for the chat and hopefully if you’re out there listening to this, you found this really useful.

0:30:18

Speaker #2

Thanks very much. Appreciate.

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