It’s been almost a month since our ecosystem partner Kik rolled out its first Kin-powered experience, chat themes. As the first live consumer use-case of Kin, both product teams faced challenges as they introduced another layer of the Kin/Kik partnership to Kik users.

We sat down with Laura Newton, product manager at Kik, and Noa Kessler, Product Manager at Kin, to discuss the integration process, building a consumer-facing crypto offering, and key learnings that will be applied as future partners integrate Kin.

Finding the Right Product Opportunity for Kin in Kik

Incorporating Kin into Kik was a two-fold effort that needed a new, meaningful feature for users, but also required educating these users on how cryptocurrency would supercharge this and other new experiences.

Noa Kessler (NK): What do users want? How can Kin benefit users? How can Kin open up new experiences? Our approach is to not force Kin into existing features — this applies to all partners — but to build new features with Kin. How can we really reward users with something new and enjoyable to them?

Laura Newton (LN): Within that, how do we communicate what Kin is to users, especially as the first partner to integrate it? Do we explain it as a cryptocurrency, a digital coin? In all of our user testing, participants most easily understood Kin with chat themes, so that’s one of the main reasons we chose this feature for the integration.