Documenting and researching a developers journey through Web3 for Consensys

Researcher Tyreek Houston and I were tasked with building a company understanding of how developers transition from an interest in Web3 to building successful decentralized products and where Consensys developer products support them in their journey.

I was tasked to work through how developers use our products based on existing research and stakeholders' knowledge of their products. I conducted interviews with nine stakeholders to understand what they hope to get out of the process and met with product leads to understand what each of their product's journeys looks like. I gathered supporting materials from each product, marketing, and sales.

After digesting the interviews and collecting documents, I mapped out key steps to the developer's journey into Web3 through to building successful applications for Web3. Based on our information, we understood this process to be fragmented overall and for Consensys products. While each product had brand recognition, most developers didn't understand that they were all made by the same company. Awareness, acquisition, activation, and engagement were all happening unsystematically.

Once we established a draft journey map, we ran two workshops. One was to collect feedback and poke holes in the assumptions we were making from the team and the second was to start to think through possible solutions for the issues that we were seeing in the developer journey both overarching through web3 and within our tooling for web3.

Going into research, we wanted to validate the assumptions made in the Journey Map. Tyreek took things over and conducted several interviews to validate the user journey we had created, but all identified opportunities for us to strengthen our product offering.

Taking the research that we gathered, we felt validated in our first draft of the developer journey. We started to map an ideal journey through the web3 development ecosystem and how Consensys products could seamlessly integrate into that process. The interviews gave validation to a suite of tools; where the integrations between products are seamless. We feel more strongly about this solution because the sales team had success in packaging our products together.

Along with the research, we wanted to build off the DevU North Star metric and Matthieu Bouchaud's growth loops for Infura. These internal standards guided us to develop loops in the ideal journey along with clear landmarks for each stage of growth for developers and Dapps.

We presented this information to product leadership throughout Consensys and publicized the work to anyone interested.