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

Understanding the roadmap

In the previous chapter, while understanding the business and the platform strategy, we discussed that strategy is a plan to achieve an overall objective or goal. A roadmap is one step beyond that. It is a plan for executing the strategy. A roadmap is a plan of action that specifies the objective or goal and the path to reach that objective, along with significant milestones.

At the strategic level, business vision tells us our business's goal, and the strategy tells us how we will achieve that goal, whereas at the execution level, the roadmap tells us what we are building, and the strategy tells us why we are building it. Let's look at the example of the ridesharing platform from the previous chapter:

The roadmap is a link that connects the strategy to the execution. It communicates what we are building and relates it to the strategy to know why we are building it. It is a potent tool used by product managers to share...