Riding the Rising Tide: A Product Leader's Guide to Decentralized Identity Wallets
Why Your Best Product Instincts Will Sink You in Uncharted Waters
This series of posts offers Product leaders and executives a strategy guide for decentralized identity wallets. As experienced and accomplished product strategists, we’ve learned to be effective in many areas of the tech landscape — but the dynamics for decentralized identity (i.e. W3C DIDs & VCs; sometimes called self-sovereign identity or SSI) wallets are different from anywhere we’ve been before.
Learn why the rising tide is path-dependent and the role of wallets is pivotal.
Uncover the Three-Wallet Problem (in Part 3) and understand its implications.
Find out why “wallet wars” will ensure mutual destruction for all players in the decentralized IDtech space.
Reveal that the rising tide depends not only on the development of atomic networks but also on “safe and open shipping lanes” to connect them.
And there’s good news!
The Three-Wallet Problem has a solution — one that can sidestep the problem and bring about the rising tide. By the end of this series, you’ll not only discover the solution but also craft a playbook for your organization to steer clear of the problem altogether.
Read the Series Now
Series Preface: For context around the topics and terminology discussed in this series, as well as a bit about me and why I write about them.
🗓️ Subsequent posts in the series will be added here as they’re published…
Why You Need This Series
In this series of eight posts, you’ll gain the unconventional insight you need to avoid the Three-Wallet Problem, ride the rising tide of decentralized IDtech, and unlock exceptional long-term growth for your product and organization:
Does your strategy treat your wallet as a key component of your product offering?
Are you optimizing for your wallet’s user growth and retention?
Do all your users adopt your wallet as an early phase of your product’s onboarding flow?
Are you crafting your wallet to perfectly suit your industry vertical, problem domain, product, and feature set?
Will your wallet help to differentiate your product to build a strong, defensible moat around your business?
If you answered yes to most or all of these questions, you have great product-strategy instincts. And applying them in the realm of decentralized identity wallets is going to backfire. By the end of this series, you’ll understand exactly why — and how to craft a winning wallet strategy.
