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

Case study

For the backlog prioritization of our educational content-sharing platform, Escola, let's list down the features or capabilities that we had identified prior to the launch but were not added in the MVP:

  • Show the educators followed
  • Recommendations
  • Add and read reviews
  • Connect with other students
  • Connect with other educators
  • Create groups
  • Reshare content
  • Configuration management (technical capability)

For this backlog prioritization exercise, we will assume that our metrics results suggest we are trending low on getting users on the platform. Interaction on the platform is good, which means educators who are on the platform are actively sharing content, and students are engaging with the content. The ratio between users on the platform and content shared is good. Also, the connection ratio is trending OK. Hence, the metric that we want to optimize by way of priority is accumulation, followed by connection and interaction.

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