Tell us about what you do at Dune and what your average day looks like? 

I’m a director of Product at Dune. More specifically, I lead our Data UX team which means I make sure we have the best data to meet our customers’ needs. This could be data to support trading, lending, staking, asset management, market research and many other use cases. On a typical day, I like to start by checking slack and email to make sure there isn’t anything urgent that needs attention, and doing a quick check of the latest industry news. Things move very fast in this industry so it’s important to stay informed. For the next few hours I work on building towards our highest priority projects. Right now, for example, we’re building a new feature to stream dune datasets to our users. That means I need to work with our engineering team on the product technical requirements and milestones, and talk with as many customers and prospects as possible to understand their goals and how we can best help them achieve them.

In the afternoon I usually have a number of regular meetings. I like to keep them grouped together so I can get them all done at once. This might be a team weekly, a project check in, one on one meetings, customer meetings, leadership meetings, or company all-hands. At the end of the day I double-check to make sure I haven’t left anything hanging before stepping away from the computer.     

How did you get into Product?

The first time I got into product was right out of university, and I wanted to do something quantitative and analytical. I became a product manager at an electronic medical records software company where my team built the healthcare analytics tools to support Operating Room Managers. I got to travel to hospitals across the United States and learn what metrics were most important to OR managers, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses. I learned first-hand how data analytics could be used to improve patient outcomes, decrease wait times, and reduce costs.

After a few years I decided I wanted to move to NYC (from Atlanta), and get experience across a broader range of companies and industries. I joined Keyrus which is a data analytics consultancy. While there I worked on extended projects at Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, NPower, Scottish and Southern Energy, and Goodwill to name a few. Rather than product management, I was hands on building analytics applications for these clients.

Eventually, I was leading a full department at Keyrus and had learned a ton in both technological and business terms. By then, I was ready to get back into Product Management. As a consultant, I was using other people’s products, and I was ready to be on the product-building side again. I had developed an interest in blockchains, but couldn’t find anything in the blockchain space yet so worked for a bit as a product manager for a geospatial analytics company. The mission there was to make mapping software as easy to use as any other BI tool. I absolutely loved geeking out about cartography and location analytics, and helping - for example - cities improve public services and emergency response times.

Eventually, I finally got a chance to get into the blockchain space by joining Chainalysis. At Chainalysis, I built out the global intelligence team which was responsible for building the dataset used for investigations and compliance. This meant mapping what was happening in the world to its footprint on the blockchain. For example, identifying the cryptocurrency holdings of centralized and decentralized exchanges, wallet providers, payment processors, gambling sites, darknet drug markets, ransomware groups, scammers, and so on. It was astounding how, because of the transparency of blockchains, you could see the intricate movements of an entire economy play out in front of your eyes.

This role was very demanding as it required the absolute utmost care for data quality and speed. We had to be innovative, fast, and accurate with no room for mistakes or the consequences could be dire for our customers and the industry. I’m very proud of the work I did there along with my team.

That eventually led me to Dune where I am today. I was drawn to Dune because of its mission to make crypto data accessible which is a mission I share. The very reason I was drawn to blockchain technology in the first place was its open access to information. However, just because blockchain data is technically open, it still requires a lot of skill to make use of it. Dune does that work, and has an open platform for anyone to be able to use it. I wanted to bring my skills to this mission to make sure that the data we make accessible is of the highest quality and usefulness.       

What has been your favorite Dune moment and why?

In 2024 we built the Dune Index which is a metric of real adoption of blockchains. I had such a good time diving deep into questions like: what metrics represent actual adoption? How can we combine them in a way that answers the question concisely? How do we filter out noise? How do we have one metric that accounts for the complexities of many different types of blockchains? They were difficult to answer, but it was very fun iterating over the methodology and calculation logic and eventually building the final metric. You can read more about it in my blog post here. 

Connect with Hannah:
linkedin.com/in/hannahcurtis