Episode 137: Answering Questions About Platform Product Management and What That Means

Have a product question for Melissa? Submit one here, and Melissa may answer it in a future episode.

Q&A:

Q: Dear Melissa, we are re-platforming a product at the enterprise level. My product will need to build the specifics we need once the enterprise infrastructure is in place. It's a platform that today is tech-heavy to manage and maintain. I want to shift the approach to give ownership to internal users to maintain their own pieces and make their own updates. However, putting dollars in value to something conceptual is challenging. What's a good way to sell a different way of doing something that will drive long-term improvements in a manner that can bring data and dollars to the table in an analytical environment?
A: So, doing a re-platforming or changing something like this does actually translate to dollars. Sometimes it's hard to think about it, but it does. So if you think about what you are trying to do, which is putting the things in the hands of the internal end users and allowing them to make changes instead of the developers to do it, you're actually streamlining operations, and you're freeing up your developers to work on other things, which is opportunity cost at the end of the day. So when you're thinking about doing a platform change like this, from what I understand, what this means is that you want to make it possible for people to go into the system and change things themselves to enable the end users to do that. And there's a cost associated with doing that if you are doing it for them.
Q: Dear Melissa, we recently grew our engineering team and are now able to reform into three squads. One of the squads is more platform-based, and I was moved to that squad because I am the most technical of all the product managers. While it makes sense on paper, I am no longer doing end-user product management, which is what I love doing. Thankfully, the engineers that are on my team are incredible, experienced, and, best of all, great peers to work with, so I'm at least excited to learn and lean into the infrastructure and DevOps experience. However, I'm at a bit of a loss for understanding what the day-to-day should and could look like as a technical product manager to make sure I'm doing the best I can in this role. I know what it looks like for end-user product management, but this feels foreign, and no one on the team is able to give proper guidance. Do you have any advice on this type of transition and role?
A: Platform product management is weird because now you have to start to think about who your end user is, and your end user is the people internally. So this is an opportunity for you not to just prove that you can do great technical product management and learn from your peers, which is fantastic, but it's also an opportunity for you to get some goodwill because you're helping the people who sit around you all day long, and they're gonna be very excited about that, so you should get excited about that too. So when you think about going into a more technical backend team what you're doing is worrying about the user experience, but the user experience from a workflow perspective of the people around you.
Q: Dear Melissa, I'm soon starting a new position as a product manager for a platform team, and I could use some advice on how to approach it. Having internal teams as end users and not having a designer on the team is new to me. How do we run product discovery in a platform team? Does a product trio become a product duo? Any tips to get started?
A: Hopefully, the tips I just gave will help you as well. But let's dive into that one key part of product discovery because I think that's important. I've heard a lot of people say, oh, you don't need discovery on platform teams or backend teams, and that is just straight out wrong. Product discovery is still extremely important on a platform team, you're just not gonna have a designer working with you. Instead, you're gonna work with your tech lead, so you and your tech lead are going to be joined at the hip, your trios going down to a duo. And that's totally fine. And what you really want to do as well is partner with the other product managers around the company and other tech leads and other developers.

Resources:

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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