The Platform Story: Part 2
Previously on…
In the last installment, we talked terms, examples, and key problems. This time around, we’ll dig in a little deeper into translating your reasoning into goals. Next time around, I’ll talk through the mental positioning necessary to hitting those goals.
Also, I’ll actually introduce myself.
👋 Hi! I’m Max
I’m part of the Platform Team at Frame.io, a ~100-person startup in NYC that’s doing its best to improve the way video professionals manage their entire creative workflow and content lifecycle.
I’m not an engineer, but the engineers I work with are pretty great. Sometimes they have to review bits of Python I fumble out, and for that, I am truly and deeply sorry.
A year and a bit ago, we decided to commit to a platform strategy. We started publishing docs and guides to test the water, and have since scaled to:
- a fully-featured developer portal
- a small-but-vibrant community on Spectrum
- some very, very cool partnerships.
Some of our lessons learned have been obvious (e.g., getting your priorities on other companies’ roadmaps is tough); other things have caught us by surprise.
I’ve been with the company for about two years, and have been part of its platform story since the first endpoints went public. In many ways, the story I’m telling here is just a small slice of Frame.io’s own story, and I’m functioning as an opinionated subject-matter historian.
Every product, platform, and strategy will be unique, but I’m hoping some of what we’ve experienced will be useful to others as explorations, lessons, and poorly-told anecdotes, so let’s get back into it.
Goals
While I’m rarely one to shy away from launching into something for reasons like, “I just want to,” or, “it’ll be fun,” we should do a bit better here.
So far, we’ve made a pretty nice bed for our journey:
- We’ve looked at a couple reasons you might want to take this wooly little journey.
- We’ve defined “platform,” at least to the degree of having a semi-viable North Star.
- We’ve explored a couple examples of top notch companies, and peeked into their versions of the platform journey.
If you still want to push forward and build a platform, awesome. But before you go any further, you should take another critical look at your initial reasoning, and develop some actual, tangible goals.
Needless to say, we’re clear into “every company is a unique snowflake” territory here, but I can share a bit of Frame.io’s and my perspectives.
Goal frameworks
This subject is way, way outside the scope of the topic at hand, but it bears a quick mention. Goal frameworks are all around us , and whatever your organization uses— OKRs, sales quotas, revenue targets, NPS, cohort adoption/retention , SMART— you probably have some accountability to some number, somewhere, based on some pop business book by someone famous.
While daunting (and a bit dry), tying your work to an accepted framework is a great way to stay focused and gain consensus.
Framework goals also create a natural dialog between strategy and execution, which is handy when trying to decide what to do.
A goal framework in action
Here’s an extremely loose rundown of how we can go from revenue (a top-level, measurable objective), all the way to framework-driven questions that can inform daily action:
- The business has a revenue target of whatever dollars, and projects that some X% over Y months will come from the enterprise customer segment.
- We can hypothesize (and model) that this increasing enterprise dollars via shorter deal cycles net positive customer churn will help us reach the revenue goal.
- We further hypothesize that we can hit both of these goals by increasing the number of integrations associated with each enterprise deal.
- To increase integrations, we hypothesize we should onboard X new partners, including this one we hear about, like, a lot.
- To measure which we should focus on, we should make the above informed bet, plus add reporting instrumentation to our sales process.
- We can model that usage is an important leading indicator of value, and therefore lock-in, so we also want to measure integration usage; but we can’t today.
Using the above sequence, we can (pretty) easily lay out measurable goals:
- Onboard X new partners, including the one we hear about a lot.
- Build and implement measurement instrumentation for partner integrations.
And we can measure the downstream impacts by comparing deal cycle and net churn pivoted on number of integration systems.
For bonus points, we can also track earned media and marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) as a factor of each new partner so we have baselines for next time.
It’s an imperfect art, and every org will have its own special flavor that’s probably precious to the person who read whatever book; but the overall value is immense, and I highly recommend Lean[ing] In™️ to whatever framework your company’s trying this quarter.
What if we don’t have goals?
If your org doesn’t use any kind of framework, the good news is that you get to hop into the driver’s seat and start gently leading that conversation. The bad news is you’re now trying to spearhead two disparate strategic initiatives, so maybe socialize the need for goals, shift the responsibility elsewhere, and offer to be an advocate and partner if needed.
Like I said — out of scope.
Goals for Frame.io
The strategy
Video technology is pretty wild. For any given production, there are potentially dozens of moving parts, people, systems, and processes; and for every second of content, untold dollars of risk wrapped up in a complex workflow. This leads to a couple of downstream effects:
- Risk aversion — if it worked once, never, ever change it.
- System lock-in.
As with any software-enabled industry, you’ll run into epochs: a small production starts up and someone takes it on as a pet project to experiment with workflows; a new CTO comes along and RFPs the world; that kind of thing. But in the mainstay, your best move as an emerging software company is to absolutely nail one common workflow piece, drive lock-in around it, and slowly balloon out from there.
In the case of Frame.io, that one piece started out as review and approval, which is a pretty natural jumping-off point for integrated workflows — whole media comes in, whole media goes out, and in the middle, you’re probably tracking your project somewhere else anyway.
Also, tracking and moving around whole files is an annoying, constant, and high-context-thrash activity — so we had a natural first enemy to attack with automation.
Finally, as a small software company — especially one trying to create a market — it’s critical to stay on mission, and not get distracted into nice things that you’d love to build, but probably shouldn’t. Especially if/as you gain popularity, it can become increasingly hard to remember your own mission, and not let external forces backseat-drive your product roadmap.
In summary: launching a platform was a natural move to expand Frame.io’s functional footprint in the world of video workflow in a way that:
- Leveraged our ability to drive partnerships through relationships and positive marketing.
- Enabled the core product to stay on track with its core mission and vision.
- Played naturally into the video workflow industry’s tendency for complex, locked-in, multi-system workflows.
- Had a great chance of translating quickly and directly into real customer value.
Goals for me
Honestly, it came down to two things for me:
- A few years ago, I caught the consulting bug — I love helping people solve their weird, specific problems.
- I’ve been party to some fairly “meh” platform efforts, and at Frame.io, saw both the organizational direction, and real industry opportunity to get things right — or at least get a fair shot trying.
Oh…and it seemed like it’d be fun.
Previously:
Coming soon:
(By the way, this list is entirely subject to change).
- Part 3: Expectations.
- Part 4: Risk and measurement.
- Part 5: Choices, mistakes, and lessons.
- Part 6: More choices, more lessons.
- Part 7: The partner pivot.
- Part 8: Keep your head in the game.
- Part 9: TBD…
