Platform PMs are popping up everywhere as the complexity and scope of a company increase to abstract common functionalities and increase efficiencies. Let me start with a quick story:
One day about 2.5 years ago, I had 1:1 with my manager, and he mentioned to me: “Congratulations, it’s time for you to stretch yourself and lead ‘Search Platform’, and BTW the roadmap for H2 is due in 5 weeks”. The Platform Team was the largest chunk of org engineering investment (80+ Engineers), and no one in “Product” or “Leadership” deeply understood what they did.
I always viewed myself as a ‘Full Stack’ PM, and while I did have horizontal responsibilities previously, this team was at a different scale. So I frantically searched for resources internally and externally and didn’t find many good guides. Luckily I had terrific partners across TPM, Leadership, Engineering, and a dozen vocal clients. In this short post, I want to cover different types of goals a platform team takes -
Goal Bucket #1: Efficiency & Reliability
Boring stuff, I know, but business-critical. Any platform with some maturity level needs to be reliable & efficient at scale. Platform teams will spend more of their time in migration and technical improvements to keep the light running relative to the product teams. Goals in this bucket are typically p0:
Reliability: “Serving Platform up time of 99.9999…% for tier 1 partners, and 99.99% for tier 2 partners.”
Efficiency: Complete migration from X to Y and save Z% capacity
Goal Bucket #2: Joint Goals w/ Product Teams
The Platform exists for a reason. It serves product teams that build user-facing features. Ultimately, any platform improvements need to ladder up to user-facing value. Value is: faster ship time / fewer resources / better end-user performance.
It’s important to contextualize those goals, i.e., “Improvement in platform component X is responsible for Y% of the overall goal for the partner org”.
Another flavor is adding new capabilities by incubating them jointly with one internal client, showing value, and scaling them up across teams.
Goal Bucket #3: Platform as a Product
As the platform scales and has more internal clients, it makes sense to run the Platform more like a platform company. You want to increase adoption and run sentiment surveys with product teams and improve on specific dimensions that are the most important.
To conclude, a lot has been written about goal setting for Product Teams; I hope this brief article will help you think through the big buckets of goals for your platform teams. I may cover prioritization, execution & vision settings in other articles. Please drop me a comment or DM for any feedback! I would love to learn from your experience.