The Eight Key Dimensions of Platform Product Management
Successful businesses and organizations leverage innovative platforms to maximize new opportunities for growth and capital rewards. Recent statistics reveal seven of the ten most successful companies today are platform businesses. Today, up to 81% of business leaders say platform-based business models will be integral to their growth strategies in the near future. Ideally, robust management of a platform is key to ensuring it meets the expectations of the customers and company needs. The skills, methods, and techniques of platform product management differ from those needed to manage an application. This article provides a practical explanation of the eight dimensions of quality platform product management.
What Is a Platform Product?
To understand a platform product, let’s look at a platform versus a product and how they work together. A platform is a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources that helps you grow your business, enabling growth through connection. A product is a consumable or usable piece of software you sell or offer.
A product platform is a set of common elements, including underlying technical components, parts, or technology shared across a range of the company’s products. For example, WordPress is a platform used to develop multiple websites in web development. Similarly, Amazon’s website is a platform used to sell many products. Having a strong platform gives your products a competitive cost advantage.
What Is a Platform Business?
A platform business is an entity that facilitates interactions across multiple participants and users. The transaction could be short-term, such as connecting buyers and sellers, or long-term collaborations for shared outcomes. Typically, unlike a traditional business, a platform business doesn't develop or own its inventory. The platform itself is the inventory or asset. This implies that a platform business is an interface that brings separate groups of people who exchange value to benefit both groups. Some good examples of platform businesses are:
Amazon: This platform brings groups of merchants and consumers together
Fiverr: Brings freelancers and contract workers together
Apple: Enables interaction between software developers and consumers
What Is a Platform Product Manager?
A platform product manager (PM) is a professional who manages, supports, and develops large-scale underlying technologies, including operating systems and web services. They oversee the development and management of software platforms like e-commerce stores. A platform product manager's role is demanding since they manage not just a single application but the platforms of products within a business. The following are some of the responsibilities of a platform product manager:
Prioritizing and supporting the development of multiple consumer-facing products and offering a cohesive vision across an organization.
Meeting with stakeholders to get views of their needs and perspectives.
Collaborating with external vendors to enable integrations through APIs.
Management of complex technical requirements such as APIs and platform components
Checking for bug reports and automated alerts.
Finding problems with usability or performance before they become a problem on the platform.
Reviewing performance dashboards and other significant updates and changes in performance numbers.
Analyzing the feedback from internal platform users.
Lead the product direction as per the company's strategy to ensure scalability.
On a day-to-day basis, the platform product manager works with engineering teams to improve and develop core platform features, manage vendor integrations, manage and monitor APIs, and more.
The Eight Critical Dimensions of Platform Product Management
1. Meet Expectations of Different Types of Personas in the Ecosystem
A platform serves a broad ecosystem of diverse personas, including end users, developers, producers, and partners. Whether a platform product is intended for consumers, enterprise users, or enterprise administrators with diverse technical backgrounds, an application product manager should ensure they optimize the value delivered to the end users. A good platform should be customer-centric and focus on meeting multiple end-user personas' diverse needs. Rather than building platforms that only wow with incredible features, platform product managers should develop platforms that solve specific problems for their developers and partners. It should strive to empower the middle tier of the ecosystem, including developers, partners, and admins.
2. Ensure the Protection of Core Platform Interactions
Every platform product manager should ask themselves the question: What are the key platform features that give personas the most value regularly? These features form the core platform interaction, typically a company's key differentiation in the market, and should be protected. Once the core has been developed and the business model finalized, the middle tier of the ecosystem comprising developers and partners get empowered to develop complementary products on top of the core interaction. The platform approach ensures scaling is achieved via a clear differentiation between the platform's core interaction and its enablers. The product managers should determine what core is and can be shared. Failure to protect the core interactions exposes developers to competition. However, doing it right ensures complementary experiences.
3. Scale With Public APIs and Secure Access via Private APIs
As mentioned earlier, the middle tier of an ecosystem is made up of developers. These developers must be empowered to create contemporary experiences via APIs. However, many platform product managers often wonder whether to make APIs public by sharing them with all third-party developers or whether they should keep them as private as possible. Opening up your API to the public is a significant decision that must comply with industry privacy policies. Several things should guide your decision, including:
The specific data must remain private and should be exposed to partners.
The data can be exposed to public developers.
Determine whether the service or data is a unique differentiator.
Generally, the industry practice is to introduce public APIs as private ones first to ensure they get comprehensive testing before being released to the public. Afterward, they are released as "private internal" that internal teams leverage to create connectors with third-party apps. Once the APIs pass internal testing, they are scaled to "private APIs" or "beta APIs" before being released to a few ecosystem partners. If the APIs perform excellently at external partner sites, they are now released as "public APIs."
4. Fine-Tune the Microservices Support Structure
Typically, the architecture of an application is designed, developed, and managed primarily by engineering teams. On the other hand, platforms are entirely built using microservices architecture to allow business capabilities to be exposed via APIs and apps to be built on top of the platform. The platform product manager should influence the microservices architecture to ensure it doesn't become tangled to prevent scaling. The platform product manager must possess adequate technical skills to fine-tune the support structure effectively. They must also understand the data and interdependencies and limit the microservices to suit business capabilities. If the user story spans several services, it may require detailed dependency mapping cutting across different microservices.
5. Develop Features That Meet Long-Term Sustainability Goals
Platform product managers should endeavor to develop long-term sustainability versus short-term trade-offs. Usually, when developing applications, product managers leverage the business value versus effort approach to prioritize features. Traditionally, features that provide quick wins are given priority.
However, this could be different when developing a platform. Typically, a platform serves as a foundation through which multiple businesses develop their applications and manage their business model. Therefore, the prioritization of the platform features needs long-term planning to guarantee sustainability, performance, and scalability over the long run. The platform product manager must effectively comprehend the long-term strategic vision to determine short- and long-term trade-offs.
It is recommended that platform product managers strive to balance quick wins and long-term platform investments to guarantee its sustainability. If you focus only on short-term quick wins, your platform may fail to meet performance requirements when it scales the APIs for diverse market segments. This eventually spells disaster for developers, partners, and other end users. Platform product managers and their teams should boldly make unpopular decisions that may impact short-term wins but prove valuable for the platform in the long run. It always pays to think about the next-generation users when developing features for your platform.
6. Integrate Future-Proofing During Platform Updates
Standard software has a clear upgrade path overseen by engineering and support teams. Usually, new releases are managed in a manner that can only affect the end user's usage. With a platform, the platform product manager should be involved in the upgrade strategy to guarantee the long-term performance of the platform. The platform product manager should have the technical skills and know-how to develop a top-notch upgrade strategy. Specialized IT skills are needed to ensure the upgrade meets the requirements of developers and partners and the different versions of their business platforms.
Whenever a version goes through change, the platform product manager has to consider the support of all the apps based on previous versions and how to keep older APIs intact so that ecosystem developers are not adversely affected by underlying code or architecture changes. For example, when Salesforce upgrades, it integrates futureproofing by ensuring no application written on its platform is rendered obsolete by an upgrade.
7. Explore Different Platform Monetization Models
Usually, packaged software products have monetization that flows in one way. Typically, end users pay for the product directly or via ads. However, platform monetization works differently. Monetization flow with platforms is generally complex across the ecosystem of developers, partners, and end users. In some scenarios, partners and developers are paid to use the platform to amplify their network effect, thus growing the developer ecosystem and boosting the platform's growth. There are also instances when the growing user adoption of the core product judges the platform's success. With so many monetization options, platform product managers and their companies should choose the suitable model to gain optimal ROI.
8. Focus On Flexible “Platform First Culture” During a Shift
Organizations shifting to a platform should be purposeful when making architectural decisions where platforms are made. Each decision should focus on flexibility as the core of platform culture or DNA. Usually, product managers play a supervisory role while ensuring tight control over features that each team develops. This approach is only tenable with a monolithic architecture and internal developers.
A platform product usually has multiple microservices with an independent engineering team for each microservices, demanding highly aligned and empowered autonomous teams to oversee the decoupling releases that the platform microservices architecture introduced. A platform product manager should collaborate closely with internal and external developers in the platform ecosystem. Compared to app product management, where the product manager controls releases backlog and product approval, several dependencies and decisions are controlled by autonomous teams in platforms. As such, platform product managers must collaborate with various teams in decision-making.
However, the platform product manager should be the critical influencer by setting the order and pace of releases to guarantee the platform foundation's strength. A common practice in platform product development is allowing some time for research and spiking architecture changes before releases.
How the Dimensions Can Make Your Business Run More Effectively
A good platform gives your business a competitive edge in efficiency, cost, productivity, and other benefits. The following are some of the ways these dimensions help make your business run effectively:
Making crucial decisions: During platform product development, the platform product manager (PM) faces an array of possibilities that require additional information to decide on the path to pursue. Performance and Usage Metrics provide crucial data and insights that assist PMs in making essential decisions regarding the product life cycle.
Ease of planning: The guiding principles assist the platform product manager to define the tactics and strategies that should be implemented based on the product's life cycle state. Following the principles listed can help teams predict how a software product will progress through the entire product life cycle.
Offers ideal organizational transformation: The movement from a product to a platform approach takes a complete organizational change. Organizations should embed the necessary platform product management capabilities into their DNA to ensure a platform-first product. Failure to do so ultimately leads to poor strategic decisions regarding the platform's evolution. By following the above eight guiding principles, organizations can access the best platform product management capabilities to guide their future and monetize their investment.
What Are the Critical Steps in PPM?
There are four key steps that a platform product manager and their team should follow in developing a product platform:
Ideation: ideation involves coming up with ideas for platform features. This may require the platform product manager and their team to have sessions where they brainstorm innovative ideas. The team can also research what other platforms are doing and interview platform users and developers to get valuable feedback.
Development: this phase involves turning ideas in phase one into basic platform features or products that the development team can release on the platform. This process involves creating prototypes to allow the team text features to understand how they work, write codes, and test them with users and developers.
Launch: Launch is the release of features or products on the platform. The team announces the product to the world and releases the platform for public use. The teams will then gather user feedback and undertake any necessary changes based on the feedback.
Iteration: This process involves repeating steps two to four above to enhance the platform features. The feedback usually informs this process that the platform product manager and their team get from users and developers. Once changes are made, the new features will release to the world.
Different Types of Platform Product Management Teams
There are four distinct types of platform product management teams. These include:
First Teams
The first teams develop core platform features on a platform. This team has the most complex task of designing and building a product that matches customer expectations while laying a solid foundation for other products on the platform. First teams in startups include a product manager, engineer, and designer. The platform product manager role may not be tenable at this stage since the platform is in its inception stage.
Core Teams
The core team focuses its skills on developing a single product from inception to release. The primary duties of a core platform product manager are to understand customer needs and design solutions that meet those needs. They work closely with engineers to develop the product shipped to target customers. Core teams are usually found in startups and enterprise companies. Only one or two product managers can manage a single platform in small startups. However, in larger companies, multiple core teams collaborate on various products and features for the same platform. For example, Google features multiple core teams in charge of its platform's search engine optimization (SEO) and other facets. Each team usually works independently by collaborating on platform-level projects.
Growth Teams
Although growth teams don't need to build products, they are responsible for platform-level initiatives that could impact the entire product suite. As the name suggests, the growth team focuses its skills and knowledge on expanding the user base for a single platform. The team collaborates closely with marketing and sales departments to leverage marketing strategies that make the platform highly visible to the target users.
Platform Teams
A product platform team manages a platform comprising diverse members from different departments, including user experience (UX), operations, development, and marketing. This ensures there is productive collaboration and communication across all various components of the platform team. The platform team manages the entire platform and all its features or products. They create new ideas for platform features and develop them into actual features. They also release those features to users and get valuable feedback which they use to make any necessary changes. Afterward, they release those changes back onto the platform.
Tips for Platform Product Platform Manager Success
A good platform product manager should have the soft and technical skills to develop an excellent platform. Although their primary role is managing the development, they need technical skills to understand how it happens. Technical skills help them supervise and evaluate dependencies and interdependencies across various products and services.
The following are some of the tips that can help platform product managers succeed in their roles:
Maintain a top-notch QA: Bugs are not simple problems that can be fixed quickly. Significant issues could adversely impact the fundamental systems in which use products are built. Platform product managers should prioritize creative ways to maintain a rock-solid QA.
Have long-term plans: The platform product manager role requires long-term views. Platform products require longer release cycles, demanding careful planning and management of timelines and user expectations.
Reassess priorities routinely: Platform product managers deal with many tasks. It is essential to reassess priorities more often to align tasks to long-term goals. Reassessing priorities allows you to understand your constituency and its long-term needs.
Develop skills and qualifications: Consider returning to school for graduate studies, doing more product manager certifications, and working on collaborative skills to enable seamless cooperation with diverse teams.
Mach One Digital Powers Platforms To The Next Level
Platform product management provides much-needed guidance on investing limited resources to deliver competitive products that meet market needs. Platform products are designed, developed, and managed to ensure their continued success and guarantee long-term value to those who use them. Generally, platform product management is complex and requires unique skills and knowledge to succeed. In this regard, the highly skilled platform product managers oversee the entire development of a platform, from design, development, marketing, and support to maintenance of the platform's features.
If you have further questions or need help getting started, the experts at Mach One Digital are ready to help. We offer top-notch solutions to bring project ideas into reality. Our technical team is prepared to guide you through the entire platform development process, from strategy to design to execution and management. Schedule a discovery call with Mach One Digital to learn more.