Book Image

Effective Platform Product Management

By : Tabassum Memon
Book Image

Effective Platform Product Management

By: Tabassum Memon

Overview of this book

Scaling a platform is a lot different than scaling a product. This is why product managers developing or transitioning to a platform model are often facing completely new challenges – both technical and strategic. But if you want to build the next Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or a completely new type of platform, then you need to adopt a platform-first approach to change how you invent, develop, and market solutions. This is where Effective Product Platform Management comes in. This book addresses product management as a critical pillar of platform development. It'll help you understand the difference between traditional and modern product management for platforms and even decide whether the platform business model is the way to go for you. As you progress, you’ll be able to build the right platform strategy, define the MVP, and focus on ongoing backlog prioritization for successful platforms. This book will also walk you through the practical steps and guidelines that can ease your organization’s transition from linear products to platforms. By the end of this platform product management book, you’ll have learned the essential aspects of product management for building successful and scalable platforms. You’ll also have a clear understanding of the next steps you need to take to perfect and execute your new platform strategy – and take on the world.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building the Right Strategy for the Platform Business Model
6
Section 2: Building the Platform
10
Section 3: Measuring the Performance of the Platform

Defining platform capabilities

The most critical step of creating a roadmap is to identify and define features. As we are making the platform roadmap, we should start by defining capabilities. As we discussed, a capability is the ability to achieve an outcome. Hence, to identify different capabilities, we will have to start by creating an end-to-end user journey. A user journey will list down all the steps and actions that need to be taken to accomplish the goal. Completing those actions and steps will tell us what capabilities are required. Hence, to identify and list down the capabilities that our platform should possess, we will start by mapping an end-to-end user journey and then extract capabilities from it.

Mapping an end-to-end user journey

A user journey is a flow or end-to-end depiction of user actions to reach from one state to the other or from the current state to the end goal. These steps and actions are plotted together to create a user journey map. It is a very...