What Is Platform Product Manager? Overview and Role
June 23, 2021 Max 3min read
Platform Product Manager
A platform product manager is a product manager who leads a whole platform of products in a business organisation.
It is one of the most crucial roles in product management. A platform product manager prioritizes and supports the work of different products.
A Platform Product Manager manages support and development of big scale fundamental technologies like internet services and operating systems.
The platform product manager has more duties and responsibilities than the other product managers (PM)
Beyond this, the platform manager also engages with stakeholders and manages technical requirements and platforms.
Role of platform product manager
A platform product manager is one of the most challenging roles in product management.
The platform product manager is focused on the business’s vision and requires collaboration with various different departments of the organization.
They have a significant share of powers and responsibilities. They can decide whether to proceed with every demand of stakeholders or to reject some of those to keep the project aligned with the core motives and vision of the company.
A typical Product Manager is more focused on the requirements of the target market and the betterment of the user experience.
The Platform Product Manager works more on the overall company needs and product outcomes.
Characteristics of a good platform product manager
Here are the key characteristics of platform product management provided by industry experts and their comments on the various aspects of platform product management.
- Equip the different types of personas in the ecosystem:
“Customers focus and empathy is just
as important as relevant in Platform
product management. Rather than
building platforms because it’s the
next cool thing to do, Platform product
managers should develop a laser focus
on what problems they are looking to
solve for their developers and partners.”
Priya Lakshminarayanan, Sr. Dir, Head of Product, Facebook
- Protect the core interactions and enable the rest:
“If a platform product strategy does not
incorporate a “Platform First approach”
with core interaction APIs and enablers,
it will be very difficult to scale across
multiple customer segments.“
Ramadurai Ramalingam, Managing Director,
Platform Engineering, Accenture
- Scale with public APIs while providing premium or secure access through private APIs
- Influence the microservices architecture:
“A platform product manager has to
check the microservices support
structure. There is a need to get down
to the weeds of system architecture
in order to understand the DB table(s)
and what is exposed to the service.”
Doug Summe, Platform Technologist, Staircase
- Strive for long-term sustainability versus short-term trade-offs:
“A platform product manager
is different. There is no instant
gratification for the platform
product manager. They need
to be patient. Long-term
requirements are a tough sell and
can be influenced by discussing
potential total addressable market
(TAM) expansion and growth in
product lines.
Doug Summe, Platform Technologist, Staircase“
- Emphasize future-proofing during platform updates:
“Platform product managers
need to be able to drive long
term sustainability, scalability
& performance for “future
proofing” the platform.”
Heather Conklin, VP Product Management – AppExchange, Salesforce
- Optimize by exploring the distinct platform monetization models:
“Companies like Adobe & Netflix
currently do not directly monetize
the platforms. Platforms support
experiences – features are
developed to enable experiences.
so, monetization is still through
the application.”
Ashley Still, Vice President/General Manager, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud Enterprise, Adobe
- Inspire the shift to a “platform first” culture:
“In platform engineering,
we allow time for spiking
– researching and
investigating architecture
options before beginning
development sprints.”
Heather Conklin, VP Product Management – AppExchange, Salesforce
FAQs
Product is what you make and sell and platform is one that provides the medium or the infrastructure to build and sell that product. Platform addresses common problems of different aspects of a business.
It works on improvement of platform features, management of APIs in collaboration with engineers. A platform product manager supervises and oversees the development of the whole platform of products in a company.