 Hi, everyone. My name is Nirmiti Valtri and I build ad measurement products at Meta. Today, I'll be sharing some of my learnings about platform product management with the hope that by the end of this webinar, you too can force multiply for your organization through a platform thinking approach. So let's get started. As a part of this webinar, I will go over three aspects of platformization today. First is identifying the opportunity. Here, we will look into some signals from your product ecosystem that indicate a possibility to build a platform, after which we will look into what are the benefits of building a platform and then how to come up with a strategy. Before we dive deep into any of these topics, I'll give you an overview on what exactly is platform thinking. So let's get started. Customers today have highly sophisticated and ever-evolving expectations from engagement and brand experience at every touch point they interact with your product, which is why delivering on and keeping up with these expectations requires an innovation different culture with customer value at its center. That's where platform thinking can help. Let's take a look at a product org layout for a company which has a suite of products. We have Team A focused on building product capabilities for market segmenting. This team has a deep understanding of the needs of segment A and prioritizes its roadmap and team bandwidth for innovating for only segment A. It leverages technical foundations from your company stack and integrates it with product-specific understanding to build some new functionality. Likewise, we have product B and product team B, which caters to customer segment B and product team C, which caters to customer segment C. Each of these teams have their own expertise and innovate for their respective customer segments. To build product capabilities, these teams often have dependencies on other teams in the company, sometimes even on product teams B and C. This creates a complex maze of dependencies. So complex that I'm saving this image from the multiple connection lines that capture the dependencies. For almost any organization with significant brand value and historical tech investments, there will be friction from years of built-up technical and architectural depth. And unlocking core assets and business capabilities to enable customer-facing innovation is going to require a ton of effort and investment. This is where an internal platform may help. An internal platform team connects internal producers with internal customers, making an ecosystem that allows to be created and exchanged. It is essentially a set of technical components and software that provides a service to your internal teams as users to build their business logic and modules to address the business needs. Here, the platform team will interface with other package teams and build foundational blocks that will power customer experience across products A, B, and C. Through abstraction and external-facing APIs, partners can also be empowered to develop complementary experiences on top of this platform. Exposing the core is going to create competition, but doing it right creates complementary experiences that will augment the value of your product and your end customers are going to benefit more. That's where platform thinking helps. So what exactly is platform thinking? While individual teams have a more vertical approach, platform thinking is evaluating opportunities with the horizontal lines. As a product manager, we are always moving fast. It's so easy to get zoomed into our own problem space, trying to get things right for your target customer, that you miss out on zooming out and looking at avenues by which you can force multiply and drive value for multiple segments of customers. That's where platform thinking comes into picture. It's about thinking big and identifying opportunities that can make an impact to multiple teams within your organization. And while doing so, you're going to keep essential business priorities at the heart of your approach and focus on building foundational technologies that will provide long-term value. And when platform mindset becomes attached for making key technology decisions, it simplifies your ecosystem through lean and incremental development and it will simulate innovation and accelerate delivery. Every company has their own story about adopting a platform approach. Some stumble into it by chance, whereas some others might have a more systematic approach. Up next, we will look into some signals from your product ecosystem that indicate a possibility to build a platform. The number one rule of product management is listen to your customers. We'll go over some anecdotes from customers about various products for your company and dive deeper into how these could be actual signals for identifying platform opportunities. The first one is, your customer says product A has this really cool feature and they hope that it would be awesome to have the same for their use case in product B. Now, this is where product A has something that should be added to product B. Here the customer is highlighting an interesting feature that will be a great value for product B. Perhaps even other products in your suite. Let's say this is a creator on the Instagram who can link products in their post but not in their stories. This is a good opportunity for having the functionality as a foundational element across your product offerings so that any new type of format like reels or stories that are introduced can easily port this functionality. Another anecdote could be your customer says that they love your analytics product but they still end up having to perform some manual steps to further process all the analytics provided by your products. Now for a B2B product, this could be an opportunity for building functionality into the tech foundation by which your customers no longer need to perform any manual steps, thereby amplifying the kind of experience that they are getting from your product. Another case could be where customers say they noticed a difference in the experience on product B versus product C. For example, let's assume that each of your product team went ahead and built their own translation stacks and had distinct translation libraries. A user accessing your website or an app experiences different translations across your product. By creating a translation platform you can provide a uniform experience across your products thereby giving cohesive experience to your customers. The next one is about understanding the lay of the lab. A large part of product management is about being curious, keeping your eyes, ears, and mind open so that you can connect the dots. A good practice is to stay connected with other teams within your company or org depending on the size. Understand what they are building. Are there other teams building capabilities that could be beneficial to your team? Are you building something that other teams are requesting? Look out for opportunities to establish partnership with these teams so that your teams end up optimizing on effort and speeding up delivery. Another space could be revisiting your roadmap. Road mapping is a good time to check for platformization opportunities. Go through the features that are about the cut line for your team. Let's see your team is leveraging the rice prioritization framework. Rices, reach, impact, confidence, and effort. Focus on the confidence and effort estimates. Find out if your team is building something that has a high reach and impact, but your team is not really confident to build it and requires a lot of effort. If you're headed out to build something new, is your team the right team to then build it? Does it really fit in your tech stack and team's expertise? Would other teams also benefit for something similar? Leverage your understanding of the lay of the line and check if you can optimize on the cost. There could be possibilities that features that were below the cut line might now suddenly be built by some other team who can partner with and bring those above the cut line. So always look for opportunities where you can connect the dots and truly optimize on value. A next opportunity could be a pivot plan. I will talk about two scenarios where you can consider pivoting towards a platform approach. The first one being a zero to one product. Let's say your team built a zero to one product and you didn't actually find a product market fit. While the overall value problem might not have really connected with your customers, there might be some positive reviews about some functionalities that they wish you would cut it. This could be your signal. There is a potential to turn some of these high-coated functionalities into a platform capability and exposed to internal and external 3P partners who can then leverage it to amplify their customer experience. Another scenario is your team owns a highly accessed product surface on which other teams want to also surface their features. This could be another great opportunity to identify building blocks that can be spun off into a platform team which enables other teams to further build on your platform and add to the total value offered to your customers. Let me quickly summarize how platforms can be beneficial. Through platformization, product teams can focus on developing features that are well positioned to be building. Multiple teams can then leverage the platform foundational blocks for launching faster. And along with launching faster, it also paves the path for a coherent user experience across your product suite. Because all teams are leveraging the same foundation and coherent user experience improves your customer trust on your overall product portfolio adding to your brand value. Having a platform team focusing on specific problem also makes them specialists in that problem. They can provide in-depth and unbiased consultation to the teams that is not product specific. Reduce tech depth and simplify ecosystems keeps the friction overall at minimum. And the goal of the platform is to focus in the middle tier. The developers, producers and partner partners in the platform ecosystem so that they can in turn deliver optimal value and rich coherent experiences to their end users. The multiplier effect is successful when the platform ecosystem is larger and more powerful than the company itself. So we went over four benefits of platformization. First one is launch faster. Second is cohesive user experience. Third is extended value. And fourth is thought leadership and reduce tech debt and friction. So now that we have learned to identify the opportunities for building a platform and the benefits of it, how to come up with a platform strategy. There are multiple frameworks that can guide your thinking but I'm not going to get into all of those. What I'm going to list out instead is some key areas that you should focus on when you head out to establish a platform. When you build a platform, your direct customers are internal. Your internal customers end up being the intermediaries between your platform and the customers who buy or use your company's product or services. This could be a limiting factor that prevents your team from understanding the bigger picture. Here, you can see vertical A has their own strategy and goals. Vertical B has their own strategy and goals on each product within these verticals and their respective areas. All of these in turn roll up to the company's vision and strategy. And if you are not directly talked into all of these ideas, it hinders you from having a deep understanding of the broader strategic goals of the company and thereby your internal customers. So it is absolutely essential for platform teams to start developing an understanding of the broader strategic goals of the company. Next is defining the problem. Let's say you learn that teams within your company want to experiment or perform some A-B test on their product to validate their hypothesis. But the externally available products are not really meeting the specific needs and there are some integration problems. Therefore, these teams end up building their own solutions or lightweight experimentation which do not really meet their needs. Your team might have already had a solution that you use on your product. But will this solution work as is for all the teams in your company? Perhaps not, but you need to study pain points and learnings from these different distinct teams and also understand similar products or platforms in the market and define a clear problem. The platform approach is really an embodiment of a desire to scale and scaling can only be achieved through a clear distinction between the platform score interaction and its enablers. So dive deep and study each of these internal team's pain points and try to find a commonality between them. What could be the foundational need that your teams can address while your customer teams can focus on enhancing them as for their specific use case? Study industry trends and help those to formulate your better understanding of the space and establish the boundaries. Always keep in mind that technical choices tend to have compounding implications over time and especially that's even more important in case of platforms. So it is very, very important to develop a deep understanding of the customer personas and the industry trends to really define the problem. As you go about defining your vision and strategy, start socializing the idea around. Try to get feedback from your partners, internal customers and leads. This is a point where you need to have a clear understanding about how your team is uniquely positioned to solve this problem. Back it with data. Talk about how your team has solved the problem in the past, leverage the lay of the land concept to present needs from internal teams and map it to overall company roadmap. Use the rice framework that we discussed previously, confidence and effort numbers from your roadmap and internal customer teams roadmap to quantify the need to your stakeholders and use this to forecast the overall impact you will make, not just short-term, but also long-term. Next aspect is about how you will measure success. As a platform, you will work across teams that have different success metrics, just as how we saw vertical A and B in the past. Some might measure engagement, example monthly active users, while some might measure incremental revenue. You will need to define success metrics for your platform, which measures your total impact. This would involve normalizing the impact per internal team through a common metric that rolls up to your org and company goals. This will be extremely important for prioritizing requirements from the teams. Along with business metrics, as a platform, you will need to measure your platform quality, latency, scalability, uptime, availability, on-call issues and sets. You could normalize these as well and create a composite metric or have a top line and others is tracking metrics. The important thing though, is to have both business and operational metrics to measure success. And lastly, as a platform team, you are enablers. However, you can't build everything at once. But once you've established a platform, multiple teams will approach you to help them build. Prioritization is not going to be easy. So focus on opportunity sizing. Each of these requests, and then go through and find out what is where you can make the most long-term impact. You will need to balance short-term versus long-term needs and have good guiding principles in place on how you will prioritize and share these upfront with all your stakeholders so that you set the expectations right. Platforms are created to help teams scale and move faster, but there will be a point where you will hit capacity constraints. At this point, it's important to not become the bottleneck for these teams and have a plan in place to enable teams to unbroom themselves. Even add customizations and extend on the core functionality. This way, your team could focus on building the most important core features and your internal customer teams can customize and extend on it as needed. Factoring these into your strategy will help set the right expectations with your stakeholders as well as leads. As we conclude, I would like to highlight the fact that platform thinking lets you force multiply. It enables your company to shift to scalable infrastructure that's built to systematically launch new products and grow your business. Understanding how platform product management will change your product organization and your company can be the difference between an organization that's built last and a one-trick pony. Building a new product is often fraught with ambiguity. The need to respond quickly to customers, pivoting, prototyping, doing whatever it takes to find product market fit. This is not the time to start building out the platform underneath the product. Instead, understand where your product stands and your company's roadmap. Have we established product market fit? Find those things out. Are you growing sustainably? Is your company planning to introduce multiple products in three to five year timeline? Is your company planning to reduce time to market for new products and features? This is a good opportunity to actually sit back and understand where your product stands and your company's roadmap and figure out if the time is right for you to pivot towards a platform approach. Lastly, some companies may not really have the sufficient scale or diversity to benefit from having an internal technology platform. And investing in the platform might in fact be counterproductive for such companies. However, they can still benefit from using external technology platforms. Familiarizing yourself with industry trends is going to enable you to innovate and move fast. So once again, I'd say platform thinking lets you force multiply. It enables your company to shift to scalable infrastructure that's built to last. It helps you to provide a cohesive user experience, extend on the long-term value and reduce the tech debt and friction required to build new products. With that, I will conclude this webinar. Thank you for your time and attention. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thank you. Bye-bye.