How Does a Platform Product Manager Drive Impact?

Story

When I was the PM for overhauling the billing infrastructure, that gave me the stress often associated with platform work; but also some insight on how to demonstrate impact.

At the time, I felt that just delivery was, itself, impact. After all, the existing infrastructure was bad, and we knew we were losing potential customer who would prefer to use PayPal.

What I got right was getting a clear (although painfully exhaustive set of requirements) down and managing on-going delivery.

What I missed was using communication to drive impact. I kept key stakeholders updated on core delivery and potential slippage. And I think that's an important piece.

But I would zoom out in the following ways for platform (IdP):

What does impact mean?

Every company may end up defining the impact differently.

Without gaining agreement, especially with key stakeholders, this will be a problem.

Eventually, you'll want to hone in on metrics that matter, but it's alright to find some kind of "North Star" that represents what the impact will be.

But as context, let's first look at how companies define the impact of their internal platform.^[1]

• More than two-thirds, or 68%, reported that development speed at their companies has increased.
• Most of those respondents who have a platform team report seeing better system reliability (60%), more productivity and efficiency (59%) and better workflow standards (57%).^[2]

If we accept the premise that a platform approach, versus an "every team for themselves" approach, yields better promises of DevOps maturity, what has been a factor that separates those that succeed from those that don't?

According to the article, that x-facto has been a Product Manager dedicated to the platform success. The valued skills match the Product Manager discipline.^[3]

The top three are:

• Strong communication skills
• Problem-solving expertise
• Ability to foster cross-team collaboration

This provides clues in terms of how the impact is delivered.

In the same way that an external product manager needs to apply these skill for their customer-facing products, a platform product manager does the same.

why do product managers impact platform outcomes?

But why do these skills result in the outcomes?

Let's define some of the possible problem states.

If your company is exploring the value, defining the problems to solve can help provide the clarity.

In other words, what are the hurdles that must be overcome to achieve the value of the platform?

For example, one of the strategic benefits is increasing the valuation of your business. This is achieved by reducing the time to market for new products that can increase the revenue in top of the core product post PMF.

product managers solve trade-off problems

Execution problems can be solved by the engineers themselves.

The challenge comes when there are trade-offs to be made among multiple stakeholders.

Here are some examples:^[4]

• Two teams have different concepts of how they want to present data or process data to the customer because they have different customer needs (e.g. one wants fewest required fields; other wants maximum options)
• Alignment on different corporate goals (e.g. new marketing capabilities need new features vs infosec requires more hardening and standardization)
• Tuning abstraction levels - teams will have different ideas of what is infrastrastructure, what is standardized, what should be abstracted, what do they want granular control over -- a central person who horse-trades and harmomizes those design philosophies

It's not that the engineers can't solve it technically. It's mostly a factor of time and focus.

Objective functions for a given EM or other stakeholder is to optimize for their execution goals.

However, platforms need to solve for the highest total return with the lowest deviance from any individual objective function. But there will likely be deviance in the initial problem solving space.

That's a lot of overhead.

• Different teams have different tools already
• Provisioning times for resources are too slow
• Hand off times are too high between teams
• Security and safety practices increase the cognitive load of developers

Part of the role of the product manager is to harmonize and prioritize the different needs and pain points of the internal teams.

This can involve a number of approaches:

• Identifying the real job to be done by existing tools
• Uncovering UX/DX preferences
• Drilling into the desired workflows and practices

Drive Communication Into the Open

One difference between an internal platform product manager and an external-facing PM is the collaboration.

If, for example, an external-facing PM were to encounter two sets of users who wanted different features, he wouldn't likely create a collaborative open conversations about the trade offs (I would suggest this would be a good, albeit untraditional and risky approach, that we see in open source or blockchain environments).

The Platform Product Manager, however, may be the one to frame the trade offs and bring the different stakeholders into a conversations.

Then share the progress of those decisions to the wider group of developers for awareness and input.

This depends on the culture of the company, of course. If the company prefers silos, this would not work. And the platform probably will ultimately fail no matter what the product manager wants to do.

Because the job is to drive communication to invite collaboration.

The job fails when there is a mandate.

Communication desires to drive Collaboration and Commitment is one of the ways to drive this impact.