Lenme - App to lend and borrow with confidence.
In 2017, after analyzing the market conditions and the strengths and weakness of blockchain technology, we set about determining which real-world use-case provided best opportunity to build a startup around. Ultimately, we were pointed towards the underdeveloped debt-related service market, specifically peer to peer lending and borrowing, and sold the business to lenme.com in 2019.
When we started this venture, blockchain technology had high energy/gas fees for transactions, long wait times for settlements, and decentralized smart contract consensus capabilities which lead us to focus our attention on potential real world use-cases that matched those requirements. Further market/consumer research helped us identify peer to peer lending and borrowing as the most promising opportunity to pursue.
I led our organization's marketing strategy and product management. Coordinated engineering, market research, customer research, UX improvement initiatives, marketing, and legal requirements.
Notes
No matter where you are on your product management journey, I would advise you to focus on delivering results. Taking a page out of Amazon's Leadership Principles: To deliver results you have to be right a lot. To be right a lot, you have to be customer obsessed and insist on the highest standards, which in turn requires you to dive deep and invent and simplify.
I would say the most difficult part is from a timing perspective to build a strong rapport and trust with my stakeholders across Engineering, Analytics, Marketing, Program, etc. teams. It does require a lot of time as PM to build these relationships as you work on product discovery to ideation to shipping and iterating your products. But once you build that momentum with your teams, you naturally will become the single threaded owner of your products/features, gain the support of your team, and expand your ownership/scope to get to the lead/senior level.
There are many things to focus on when you first start. This can't be done in the first day (maybe over the course of a couple months) but focus on building relationships with your team and stakeholders so you can influence without authority.