What does a platform PM do?
And how to do you, as a product builder, understand if you’re suited for the role?
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I spent eight months this year as a platform product manager. Spoiler, it was not for me. As someone who has held product management roles for over ten years (!!!), one thing that has been interesting to watch play out is the dynamic nature of the role and how it continues to evolve, especially at different companies where the product you’re building and the actual day to day of the work you’re doing can be quite different. We don’t talk about this enough, how normal it is to have different varieties of product manager (even in one single organization) and how different people with diverse skills either are or are not suited for different varietals of the role. Now I want a glass of wine 🍷
Back when I was at Airbnb, I helped shape the product manager skills matrix that was used during bi-annual PM calibration. During this process at Airbnb one thing that was heavily debated was whether or not to create a separate skills matrix for platform PMs. It had become clear that the product managers doing start-up/product market fit work, vs. those doing growth work, vs. those working on the core platform needed different skills to be successful. It felt intellectually dishonest to calibrate those folks against others in different roles because the work was actually quite different.
As a PM, especially if you’re considering taking a new role, make sure you think about the type of PM work you enjoy, what gives you energy, and where you like to spend your time. Platform work might be your bread and butter, or not. The good news is that there are lots of roles out there for you, I want you to be in one that you enjoy.
Anyways, back to platform product management. In the Women in Product Facebook group this week there were questions around the platform product manager role and what the work involves. I’ve also noticed a lot more focus recently on the craft of platform product management and have seen a lot more companies posting jobs for these roles. It takes a special kind. Here’s a recent job description for an API platform PM role at Etsy (cool job alert!):
Here’s my take:
What is a platform product manager?
A platform PM builds the underlying system that powers future feature development. They might do some consumer-facing feature work, but their primary responsibility is making sure the larger system being built enables the needs of the larger organization so it can bring value to the customer(s).
Because I love to commit to a terrible metaphor (and actually really would like a glass of wine), a platform PM is the person who is taking care of the larger winemaking ecosystem. They care about the goings on at the vineyard, like the quality of the dirt, tending to the vines, and anything and everything that will impact the grapes that you’ll eventually drink. Consumer facing product work happens further downstream at the winery. A platform PM gets the system producing the right output, before a consumer facing PM tweaks the flavor notes, bottles it, markets it, and sells it.
What do platform product managers do?
But back to the purpose of this write-up, the one you clicked-in to read. What do platform product managers actually do? And how to do you, as a product builder, understand if you’re suited for product platform work? Here’s a check-list:
Systems thinking gives you energy. You love to understand how something works.
You can think beyond the first-order. You can follow this path to the very end: If you build it that way, what happens when need to evolve it later to support X use case? Homework: read more about making smart second-order decisions.
You don’t just manage stakeholders, but are a straight-up Beth Harmon at getting into their head to see their next three moves. Knowing what they need later helps you build the right thing today.
You care deeply about the APIs. You’re as interested in designing the APIs as you are the features that are powered by them. Homework: read this awesome primer on APIs by Justin Gage of Technically.
Your roadmaps are long my friend. You’re a pro at getting out of the next three months and can live in the next three years.
You can empathize with very different customers and weave their needs into meaningful strategy. What you need internally is different than what customers want, but you sometimes need to do both. How does your strategy enable both?
You know how to measure an effective platform, which is much more nuanced. What does the system unblock, how do you measure the efficiencies you’ve created?
You love to get into the technical details. You don’t have to be an engineer (though some would argue with me on this) but you do need to be really comfy with technical concepts.
How to “platform product manage” your own career
As the product management discipline continues to evolve and organizations get better at recognizing the differences in roles and the talent needed to fill those roles, I imagine you’ll see product folks become increasingly specialized. If you were to step back and platform product manage your own career today, start by asking yourself where you think you’re heading in the next three, five, and ten years. With a loose roadmap in hand, you can begin to lay the building blocks today that will unblock those preferences later on in your career. As someone who is still figuring this out for herself though, much easier said than done 😜
What to read/watch to learn more:
And if you’re looking to better understand the role of a platform product manager check-out the following resources:
Platform Product Management with Claire Schlessinger at the NYTimes
What is Platform Product Management by Sophie Behr at Airbnb
Systems Thinking in Product Management by Andrew Yu at OnDeck
And this fun thread about early days at Apple and how they built their OS with Microsoft’s buy-in. Talk about stakeholder management.
