Platform as a Product

You should treat your platform as a product. Product development is a well studied field with a tons of great recipes to set you up for success that you can benefit from as a platform team. It also avoid one of the most common pitfall of platform teams which is building a platform that has low adoption because it does not solve its users’s problems.

Why treating your platform as a Product?

Benefit from product development best practices.

Make sure you are building a platform that actually solve your users’ problem.

Set success metrics such as adoption and internal NPS to know you’re on the right tracks.

Recipes

Here are a few recipes I’ve successful see work to set up your platform for success:

User interviews

This will be quite familiar to most product managers: you should always start with your users and stakeholders. Prepare a short interview template for example asking:

• What are your biggest pain points in your current workflow?
• What would an ideal solution for those look like for you?
• If you had a magic wand and be able to change anything in your current processes, what would it be?
• What are the next projects you will be working on and do you have all the tools available to set you up for success? And if not, what would you need?

Focus on problems rather than solutions at this point, you might have a perpsective allowing you to propose better solutions than what your users suggest.

Transparent roadmap

Once you have collected insights and requirements and you have integrated them in your strategy, the next step will be to build your roadmap. What I’ve seen work well is sharing this roadmap transparently with your stakeholders. It will increase their trust towards your platform and that also gives them an opportunity to provide further feedback.

Through this you might also find early adopters for new capabilities you are planning to build.

Sharing updates

Doubling down on transparency, sharing regular updates with your stakeholders on your progress, challenges and KPIs is also a strong mechanism to build continuous trust within your organization.

Celebrate successes

As a platform, you’re usually a bit further away from business success metrics so it’s even more important to demonstrate your impact, for example in engineering time saved and celebrate your platform successes and how you enable product development teams.

Tight feedback loops

You should have easy and frequent mechanisms to collect feedback, it can be as simple as in issues box, a one question feedback after a specific platform action or a support chat. Nothing beats being in touch with your users and listening to them.