From Marty Cagan’s work on platform product management:
“A platform is a set of capabilities that are exposed through APIs or other interfaces and which are used by other products to build or enhance their offerings.”
What it’s not:
“There are too many so-called ‘platforms’ out there that are really just unfinished products. The team didn’t do the work required to provide a complete solution, so they market it as a platform and push the work off on the customer or a developer to finish.”
Takeaways
Platform product management is about creating capabilities that enable other products rather than solving end-user problems directly. It requires a different mindset from traditional product work—you’re building for builders, not end users.
The risk is calling something a “platform” when it’s actually just incomplete. Meaningful platforms provide finished, reliable capabilities that other teams can build upon–that they want to build on. They reduce complexity and friction for their consumers, not increase it.
This links to skills of:
- Value definition: Platform teams are often several layers removed from end customers and revenue. Success requires defining metrics that are leading indicators of downstream product success, not just platform adoption.
- Community-based go-to-market: Successful platforms depend on user communities that extend and evangelize the platform as much as the core team maintains it. This requires applying community practices, like those from Community practices I learned from Cathedral and the Bazaar."
- Extensibility: every platform needs a way for others to extend its capabilities to get out of the firefight of feature requests and dissatisfied users using alternatives. The naming choice signals intent and audience. More in Platform Extensibility Models
#platform-products
Related:
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