On Platform Product Management, Part I
What does a platform product manager do and how to succeed in this role?
This is part 1 of a series where I will share my thoughts on platform product management, and the role of a platform product manager.
Why am I writing this series?
- Platform product management is a less talked about area in product management, yet it is a critical element of any product organization as it creates high leverage inside a company. By sharing my own thoughts, I hope to elicit idea exchanges from peers and learn from others.
- I have years of experience working as a platform product manager in both mature and scale-up SaaS companies, and I hope to share the lessons I learned throughout the years, many of which I wish I had known when I first started.
- I hope more talented people will become familiar with and interested in this field.
What is a platform?
Before we talk about platform product management, let’s first define what a “platform” is. Platform is becoming a buzzword; after all, every company wants to be a “platform company”. However, in the context of this series, I’d define a platform as a set of components and services in a product, which enable data to be shared and experiences to be built. Depending on its stage and domain, a company could have both an internal platform, which serves internal development teams, and an external platform, which directly enables customers and partners. In the long run, ideally, the capabilities provided on these two platforms would mostly overlap.
The need for an internal platform usually emerges when a company has more than one product line, and it wants to transition from a monolithic codebase to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for scalability. It may alternatively emerge when a company has a very complex functionality, such as payment processing, that needs to be encapsulated for easier consumption and maintenance.
The first use case that an external platform addresses is usually integration, to connect data and experiences between external products and services and its own products. As the platform matures, more capabilities would be provided for partners and customers to extend and customize the product to address more use cases, thus opening up new revenue streams.
Concretely, the types of products and services that a platform provides can include, but are not limited to: APIs (for both internal and external developers), customization and automation tools (for both technical and non-technical users), developer/partner portals, data management, Machine Learning models and services, and identity and access management.
Unique challenges in platform product management
Due to the nature of the product, there are several unique challenges of platform product management compared to other product areas.
1. Building for a variety of stakeholders
While a solution PM (non-platform PM) usually builds products for a specific type of user (e.g. recruiter, accountant, business analyst) in a B2B SaaS product, very often, a platform PM needs to build products for three, sometimes four, types of stakeholders:
- Developers, who are the direct users of the product
- Solution PMs or Partners, who are trying to sell the product built by developers
- Buyers, who are the buyers of the products built by developers (especially applicable for enterprise products)
- End users, who are the users of the products built by developers
It is crucial to consider the needs of all of these stakeholders when prioritizing and designing products, in order to make the right trade-off: it’s not just about your customers, the developers, but the customers of your customers. Many times, counterintuitively, addressing the needs of the latter is more important than meeting the needs of the former, because it’s the customers of your customers that are eventually paying for your products.
2. Long-term impact of product decisions
While it’s common to introduce UI changes quickly without many consequences (e.g. changing the colour or placement of buttons), a lot more caution is needed when introducing changes in platform products due to their complexity and enabling nature. It could take a long time to make changes, such as any related to architecture, or it could lead to severe business consequences: backward incompatible changes in an API could break a mission-critical workflow and disrupt normal business operations.
Therefore, in the initial planning and designing phase, it’s crucial to understand the ultimate vision and future use cases, not just the immediate ones. You need to identify patterns, and ensure that the design is flexible for future changes if needed.
3. Lack of direct end user access
While understanding the needs of end users is crucial to the success of a platform product, quite often, platform PMs don’t have direct access to the user and are left out in discussions with end users, since those conversations are usually led by solution PMs. Platform PMs need to go out of their way to get access to end users’ insights and understand how their products can indirectly solve end users’ problems.
How to succeed as a platform product manager?
Most of the foundational attributes and skills that are required for a PM, such as communication skills, customer empathy, analytical skills, and leadership, are also necessary for a platform PM to succeed. I won’t elaborate on these here, because there are already plenty of articles and books on these topics. I’m going to focus on the differences, especially in light of the unique challenges mentioned above.
1. Sharpen your strategic and critical thinking.
A platform PM needs to understand the big picture, the long-term company and product strategy, and the needs of multiple stakeholders to succeed. This is important because: 1. She needs to articulate the value of the platform product in the context of the company strategy, because sometimes the benefits are not inherently obvious for non-technical stakeholders, and she needs to connect the dots for the leadership team in order to get buy-in. 2. When making prioritization decisions, she needs to think through all the first order and second order impacts on the product in the long-run to ensure that the team’s effort is spent on changes that can create the most value for the company as a whole.
2. It’s not just about the developer persona.
It’s easy to focus on the developer persona when making product decisions. After all, they are the most vocal stakeholders, and are the direct users of platform products. However, it’s also important, if not more so, to understand the needs of other stakeholders. Participate in end user interviews or read research summaries, talk to solution PMs to understand their strategy, and engage with your partners to see what their success metrics are. Understand how the needs of developers connect to the ultimate problems they are addressing for end users and buyers.
3. Ruthlessly prioritize and be comfortable with saying no.
With dependencies, feedback, requests and bugs coming from all directions (end users, internal developers, partners), it’s easy to get overwhelmed. A platform PM should have a clear mental framework and enough intuition to prioritize and be comfortable with delivering “bad news”. It’s easier said than done, especially when delivering the news to customers and end users directly. Some level of diplomacy, confidence, and transparency are required.
4. Get technical.
As you can tell, the type of products that a platform PM would manage are usually fairly technical. That’s why in some companies, this role is called a technical product manager. However, this does not mean that you need a computer science degree or any software engineering experience. Be familiar with the technical concepts, take a few classes online, work on a side project, and play with APIs and libraries yourself. This should give you enough context to appreciate the nuances of building platform products and have productive conversations with your engineering teams to earn their respect.
Despite all the challenges, it’s still fun to be a platform PM. If you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to leave comments or find me on LinkedIn for further discussion. I look forward to exchanging ideas.
Interested in joining our Engineering, Product & Design Teams?
If these challenges sound interesting to you, and you are up for the challenge, we are actively hiring platform product managers as we invest heavily in platform development to support our rapid growth.
Otherwise, we’re also looking for Software Engineers Front & Back Mid/Senior/Director, SRE Platform Engineers, Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, Product Operations/Managers/Designers across all levels and even more roles across London, Remote & Berlin. To join us: apply here!
