The Platform Story: Part 5

Choices, mistakes, and lessons.

7 min readOct 28, 2019

Previously on…

Parts 1 through 4 were all background. Definitions, characters, frameworks, foreshadowing — Act I of a play about software, dragged out over 5,000 words. It wasn’t exactly gripping, but, hey, everything’s looking up. We’re ready to rock. You guys, we are gonna build a flippity-flopping platform.

This installment

This is the beginning of Act II, in which things get a little personal, a little less tactical, and a little bit dark. There will eventually be a big reveal that actually, everything has gone — and continues to go — quite well! That’s Part 6.

This is Part 5.

Honestly, none of this is terribly spicy — but I wish someone had given me the heads up about some of the downsides before I tucked into all this two-and-change years ago.

At its heart, this post is about where the growth of our platform intersected with my personal shortcomings. Your journey will look different on both sides of that equation, but it might still be helpful to see someone else’s variables and calculations, if only for context.

So, here they are: the warnings I wish I’d heard, noticed, or heeded.

Choices

Let’s get weird for a minute: everything you do is a choice. From the clothes you put on (or didn’t) this morning, to what you’re eating (or not) at your next meal — within some (hopefully) obvious and personal boundaries, everything you do is a choice.

Actions have reactions; choices have outcomes.

For the choices you make, you need to own the outcomes. If possible, embrace and celebrate them. But at the bare minimum, own them.

For the next few minutes, I’d like to talk about some of the outcomes of choosing to launch a platform. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to focus on where I’ve failed to own those outcomes, and share a bit about the downstream impacts.

New lanes

If you launch a platform, and it doesn’t click, you’ll want to figure out why. And you’ll want to make some decisions. And you’ll want to either figure out a way to pivot gracefully — tie a bow on what you’ve done and leave it as a beacon for future generations — or address your issues and try again.

This post is not about that situation.

If you launch a platform, and you do get traction, you’re going to end up with a whole world of new surface areas:

Partners: developers, marketers, channel resellers
Community: customers, tinkerers, platform users
Internal: sales, marketing, account management

Each of these surface areas will obey (more or less) the same formula, which we’ll just go ahead and call The Whale of Mediocrity.

In other words, if something starts to work, you’ll get a natural spike in your org and in your market. If you don’t give attention that new thing-that-works, it will drift back toward its natural un-resourced equilibrium. You’ll still have a little upwards trajectory you can latch back onto, but you’ll be pretty close to zero.

Avoiding the Whale and finding success requires two major activities:

For your organization: prioritization
For yourself: giving things up

Prioritization

If your platform goes into use, you’re going to have some real (fun) problems. The temptation will be to try and manage all of them at once — and you might be able to, briefly — but before long, you’ll need to pick a place to focus.

The (fully) correct answer will vary based on your organization, but no matter what, you should always ask: what would ___ look like if I didn’t pay attention to it? What will fail, and who will pick up after me?

Here’s more or less how I’ve thought about this for the past year or so:

If I don’t pay attention to customers, they won’t be as successful, and adoption will stall. The product and engineering teams will have to pick up after me. All of this will hurt our organization’s ability to ship product. Customers are the most important thing.
Partners are going through the same thing we are, so they’re likely to be pretty forgiving. If I don’t pay attention to them, we may miss marketing opportunities, or degrade relationships. Marketing will need to pick up after me, but probably won’t be able to prioritize it without my direct involvement anyway. If my customers are taken care of, I need to make sure my partnerships are healthy.
My organization needs to understand, sell, and help me advocate for all of this. There is no one to pick up after me. I need to make sure I get customers and partners set up for success. Once my main consumers are in a good place, I need to focus on internal communication.

Of course, you’ve likely gotten to this point by doing lots of other things that aren’t the things you’re prioritizing, which means that in order to prioritize these new things, you’ll need to practice the art of…

Giving things up

And that’s wonderful, because giving things up and moving into new lanes means that your efforts are succeeding, and now you have new challenges and growth opportunities ahead.

Put stupidly: if “giving things up” is the motorcycle you need to ride in these new lanes, then you need to see your new challenges and growth opportunities are the rad-as-hell friend riding in your sidecar. Celebrate them.

Of course, some of the things you’re giving up will feel precious and important. Some of the things you’re giving up will have other people come in, pick up your torch, and run to places you didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t.

The downstream effects here can be tricky to navigate:

People you worked with are now working with other people.
Executive stakeholders no longer seek your opinion on lanes you used to own.
Someone else’s hard work is earning credit, promotions, and headcount off the back of your hard work.

You need to not take things personally. You might be tempted to. Don’t.

Celebrate giving things up. It means your efforts worked, and it gives you room for focus. Just be prepared for the awkward, professional version of watching your old dance partners get to know each other.

Mistakes

So far, I’ve been pretty open about the tactical mistakes we’ve made while launching a platform.

Not really knowing our goals up front created strategic thrash.
Not knowing how to approach risk as an org has been confusing, at best.
Not setting up measurement early was — and continues to be — a pain in the ass.

But the biggest mistakes have been mine, and very personal.

Startups are hard

It’s tempting to take startups personally. Most practically shout it on the job description: we’re a family, we work hard and have fun together, the company will literally stop existing if you don’t come in next weekend; and so forth.

In some ways, this can feel magical — amazing network, sharing in the (literal) ownership of success, generally positive social experiences.

But boundaries can become problematic. Keep an eye on them. Try to leave your work feelings at work — otherwise you’ll stop having room for personal feelings outside of work, and your need for an emotionally rich human experience falls into a strange grey area.

Things that have been said to me at work:

“You need a vacation.”
“This job is living rent free in your head.”
“Come on, man. We’ve been friends for a long time. I really need you to lay off me on this one.”

Yikes.

Ego is the mind-killer

If you’re emotionally attached to your work, it can be extra tough to give things up. If you know deep down that you should be happy giving things up, it can still be tough in practice.

I’ve had a hard time with this, and it’s my own fault, but cathartic to type out loud: in a collective environment where you survive socially by cheering on other people, it can be challenging to cheer on the people who’ve picked up and run with your success.

But you have to, and if you don’t, you’re the asshole.

Lessons

Focus

Focus, focus, focus.

Remember when you set those goals? And you set up your measurements? A lot of giving things up means creating and maintaining the space to focus on those goals.

Pick a north star, make sure you can articulate how everything aligns toward it, and run at it.

Burn your ego

You are not your job. You are not professional accolades. Are you learning? Do you like your coworkers? Great. Be humble.

Run like hell

Forward, toward your goals.

I once worked for a company that had “No nostalgia” as one of its few core values. At the time, I thought it was a little strange how it played out. Three years later, it’s the only value I remember. And it finally makes sense.

Previously:

Coming up:

Part 6: More choices, more lessons.
Part 7: The partner pivot.
Part 8: Keep your head in the game.
Part 9: TBD…