![]() ![]() Useful technology : think OpenAI, Stripe, Twilio. What does your platform provide? There are 3 reasons any partner, developer or customer builds with your platform. If leadership is not in agreement, you will launch the platform, get developer interest, and then watch the whole effort die on the vine as improvements are de-prioritized, quarter after quarter. You see organic demand for your platform, and ideally see demand increase when you meet it. You can quickly identify where you can deliver on one or more of the three platform “value props” (detailed below). You might have a platform opportunity if: We usually work with clients who either are building an API, plugin, or app store model - so we’ll constrain this exploration to those types of platforms. There are usually a couple of internal stakeholders who are trying to push the platform vision, but other execs have revenue targets or growth goals, and platform feels slightly at odds with the platform push (though, they should not be at odds!). This is a conversation we often have with potential clients who are dabbling with platform, but are not entirely sold sold on the effort. So let’s think about whether you have a platform opportunity or not. Have we built a platform? Or just a product? This is where I’d like to spend the rest of this post - thinking about Steven’s concept of connecting parts of the value chain, along with Alex’s emphasis on how platform and ecosystem require each other. They are intrinsically dependent on each other. Or, in Alex’s language, platform and ecosystem co-evolve. Expose too much functionality, and any product improvement you make breaks your ecosystem, which ticks off partners. The platform paradox: expose too little functionality, and the platform isn’t useful. The platform opportunity was organic, and much of what we did as the platform team was simply unblocking, streamlining, and amplifying developer and partner demand. Inorganic.) Before we launched the platform at Slack developers were doing back bends to build with us - we did not make it easy for them, and it didn’t matter. I can’t emphasize how important and true this is (failed platforms are usually forced. The most successful platforms are the ones that grow up organically. Here’s what I think you need to know from this content: Take a spin through the deck if you’re thinking about platforms, you will be smarter for it. My other favorite way to understand platforms is Alex Komoroske’s “Gardening Platforms” principles. ![]() Most frequently, a platform offers a clearing house for value where it provides distribution and then packages up one side of the market to be consumed by the other side.” ![]() “…a platform brings together different parts of a value chain. I am already using this term with clients because it simplifies an often complicated concept. Platforms connect different parts of the value chain. Perhaps encouraging - every successful platform has a number of small failures along the way. I love Steven’s failure path summaries, and have seen every single one of these failure modes at companies I’ve worked with. What you need to know is, the paths to “platform” are many. You can do it with an API, with excellent UX, potentially through a plugin ecosystem, or by owning the data layer/storage (read Steven’s “Ultimate Guide” for a much more academic take on all of this). There are a number of ways to become a platform. I had the pleasure of getting to pre-read his content before it went live and a couple of things stood out: Steven Sinofsky recently published the best platform-definition that I’ve read (and I have been working on platforms for my entire career!). ![]()
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