Platform Product Management

Wyatt provides a list of traits required to be great at platform product management: 1. Platform product managers understand the big picture. 2. Platform PM’s effectively manage different types of stakeholders. 3. They create concise long term Product Roadmaps. 4. Project Management skills are a plus. 5. Being technical helps. 6. Obsess over accurate & concise communication. He also covers a few common pitfalls companies can encounter when they first set up platform teams: 1. Ivory tower instead of customer centric thinking. 2. Product organizations require strong architectural Leadership/partnership. 3. Investing in a platform too soon.

Evan builds on Wyatt's article with a must / should / may list of platform PM skills and behaviors.

Some Daniel's key things covered include: • For platform work, OK Rs that measure progress in milestones over 2-3 month periods within a quarter can be effective. • Measuring the time it takes to complete typical tasks before and after the new APIs are built can be a goal, aiming for a 20% reduction in completion time. • Having architectural designs completed and approved by certain dates can be an OKR milestone. • Getting feedback from internal teams early on can show if the work is positively impacting them. • The number of available endpoints can be counted as progress towards KRs. • Adoption KRs can track the number of teams starting to use the new APIs. • Usage KRs can measure the % of new APIs used over old APIs or the volume of API traffic. • Any business impact or revenue enabled by the work can be captured. • Performance, security, extensibility and maturity of the APIs can be graded on a scale and improved over time. • Having multiple Senior Engineers independently grade the APIs can help resolve discrepancies.

Here are the key ideas that Alexandra covers: • Defining a clear Product Vision and strategy aligned with the company's goals is critical for a platform product manager. This helps identify opportunities to evolve the platform to support business needs. • Collaboration with internal teams is key to understand pain points, needs and be part of their workflow. Techniques like developer interviews, Surveys and shadowing engineers can help. • Optimizing for developer productivity is important but complex. Frameworks like Product Decision Stack and DORA can help define and measure developer productivity with metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and satisfaction Surveys. • Communication skills are vital as platform managers have to communicate with engineers and senior leaders. Techniques like avoiding jargon, focusing on impact and rehearsing Presentations can help. • Security needs to be viewed as a developer-friendly tool with simple processes and practices.