Successful Product Management in a new fintech paradigm

Mercuryo believes crypto will become a part of our everyday financial reality. In order to contribute to mass adoption and improve accessibility to crypto, we’re committed to shipping cutting-edge products seamlessly, delivering world-class offerings – further pushing the boundaries of cryptopowered payments solutions in fintech.

And to do this – we need leading Product Managers!

Product Management Goes Beyond Product

Great products are one thing – ensuring their smooth development and deployment is another. Our Product Managers (PMs) work across departments and units to determine how, and when, products should launch to maximise the success of solving user challenges.

By consulting user-data and market research to inform their decisions, Product Managers require strong analytical skills in combination with a holistic understanding of the team’s vision and overarching strategy.

Mercuryo continues to innovate at a rapid pace alongside the Web3 industry. The roles and tasks of successful Product Managers are constantly evolving to keep on top of new tech, and how they impact user and market sentiment.

Product Managers also need to be well attuned to the needs of their specific teams. Our PM Bakhrom Saydulloev explains:

“Some teams believe that it is more important to define vision and strategy, others that analytical skills are more important, and others suggest that the role of PM is to deliver new values as quickly as possible. In fact, it all depends on the team and the current state of the core product.”

Bringing the Industry Closer to a Decentralised Future

Contemplating his own personal journey, Bakhrom is excited by the vast potential the future holds.

“I have been in product management for over 10 years and at some point reached my ‘glass ceiling’. Working at Mercurуo empowers me to look at familiar things in a new way and conversely brings the value of my experience from the Web2 industry to the Web3 world. As I say, the Web3 grows exponentially and to be in focus you need to constantly evolve and learn new things.”

Bakhrom lends further insight into the core values that support our A+ Product team:

“As a holistic product team, we strive to foster a product-first culture. This is instrumental in building the future by accelerating access to the exciting world of Web3.”

Our Product culture is based on the empowering product team with strong leadership, virtuosos in tech and disruptive thinking.

Despite being a primarily B2B (business-to-business) company, Mercuryo uses a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) model, informing the development of products for customers using a user-centric approach.

We use the B2B2C model, as the end-user influences on how our partners gauge value is important. We’re constantly working with our users to solve their problems more effectively.

Let Challenges Drive Your Team

The industry’s always-on nature, and rapid, competitive pace, means that team members need to “eat, sleep, and breathe the values embraces by the culture across crypto communities and ecosystems ” to set Mercuryo’s vision and best serve our partners and users.

At present, core challenges for the team involve:

Maintaining focus
Prioritising features based on value
Continuously evaluating the best ways to attract and onboard users

However, it’s precisely these challenges that drive Bakhrom and the wider team to perform with passion. As he explains:

“I love the fact that I can change the lives of millions of users for the better through my product in one way or another! By developing a user-friendly, simple and useful product and increasing the efficiency of solving users’ problems. It inspires me immensely and motivates me to wake up every morning and think about what I can do today to make the product better.”

How an Idea Becomes a Product

Great products begin with simple ideas, which are transformed into hypotheses and then validated to understand their value and scalability. Once hypotheses have been successfully tested, the product team needs to identify how the product best fits into the wider market.

Bakhrom explains how important it is to deliver the product as quickly as possible to your audience; reveal how the product solves the problem in question; and teach them how to use it as often as possible.

“This is the basis for starting out. I believe, you must first create value, execute and deliver”.

Chief Product Officer, Andrey Illinsky, echoes Bakhrom’s sentiments, explaining: “It’s vital to deliver fixes and features as quickly as possible to best determine customer satisfaction. Finding the right tempo is the key business advantage.”

Successful Product Management is an Invaluable Asset

Bakhrom echoes Mercuryo’s core belief – that the team is invaluable in ensuring the company’s success.

“There is a reason why top VCs invest in teams rather than ideas. I’d like to highlight the basic principles for teams, without which great products cannot be launched: think critically and avoid biases, validate hypotheses and experiment constantly, start from user research and data, think outside the box and remember that an idea is nothing and execution is everything. Finally, aim to be great”.

Tips for Aspiring Product Managers

“Some people think that you should first get academic knowledge, find an internship and then try it out. But the truth is that you can become a PM even tomorrow; you only have to launch your pet project and start developing it. This will be your first product experiment.

Product management is about the never-ending journey to success that is overcome by small steps. So forget the classic approach that forces us to think in a familiar pattern. Just be a PM and at the same time build yourself up with new knowledge and skills. It’s a faster path to success! This will be your second product experiment. This way you can quickly see if you are ready to be a PM or if you should be looking for something else. It is in these small iterative steps that we validate our product hypotheses.”

A Rapidly Growing Team

Bakhrom is excited about the expanding potential of Mercuryo’s role in delivering innovative cryptopowered payments solutions as we enter into a new paradigm of transacting. Mercuryo’s explosive growth encourages us to constantly look for talent to take on new and existing products to deliver value to our partners and users faster!

Findings from our recently released bearish report reveal that we are in the mid-90s if we compare, for example, the number of Ethereum addresses with Internet users. This is just the beginning of a huge, exciting journey you can take with us. It’s up to us to create disruptive products, to reinvent the way we think about payments and to benefit humanity by democratising finance.