 Good day and welcome to Product School. Today, we're going to be chatting about what it takes to thrive as a PM on a platform team. A quick introduction. My name is Shyam Narayan, and I'm a group product manager on the OneDrive and SharePoint team at Microsoft. I lead a global team of product managers focused on the files and collaboration platform. I started my career off in technology consulting, where I got to work with customers on real business problems, but firsthand to see how technology can be a true enabler. But I knew that my true calling, true passion was product development. About nine years ago, I took a leap of faith and drove headfirst into product development and product management, and it hasn't disappointed me. I absolutely find it energizing to come up with new ideas, ideating the intensity of executing on them, and taking them up to market, and just rinsing and repeating that process over and over. Just find that experience extremely satisfying and rewarding. Why platform peers? Why this topic? One, platform peers are super cool. But more on a serious note, I have this question asked or this conversation comes up quite often about, what does it take for someone to be really successful as a PM on a platform team or as a platform here? This comes up in conversations with my team, folks and coach and mentor. During interview and hiring events, I have candidates ask me this, and there's a lot of literature and explosion of content on the internet for the last few years on product management. Lots of good frameworks, lots of good tips and tricks, but a lot of them kind of have a slant towards traditional product manager and user-facing product. This talk or the genesis of this talk is essentially distilling down insights from my personal experience as a platform PM, and then watching and observing and deconstructing some very successful platform PM. Some I believe work-class platform PMs that I've had the luck and opportunity to work with. Really taking some of those takeaways, distilling them down and providing it to you, so you could take that and apply that to your role as a PM. With that, let's take it away. The first one, just know your customers, probably PM 101, and most cliche thing to say and talk about product management. But in platform PM, I have a unique perspective of how to think about your customers and talk about your customers. One, there is this first line of customers that you interact with. These are as a platform, apps developers building on you and the app teams, or services that depend on you, and you work closely with these set of customers. Then you have this second level of customers who are customers who are actually consuming these apps and services, or end users who are actually consuming these apps and services, and having a deep appreciation for the problems and challenges of the second level customer really empowers platform PMs, really expands their field of vision to really understand and wallow in the second degree of customer problems, and really bringing that back and coming up with unique ideas, coming up with unique problem statements, is often something that I've seen very successful platform PMs do time and again, and really helps you form a super strong bond with your first line of customers, and the app teams and the services, you understand their pain as well, and collaborate with them very, very effectively. So going back, know your customers, but also spend time knowing their customers will go a long way and really pay great dividends. Moving on, second one, and this is particularly interesting to platform PMs, is to watch and act on macro trends. This is a tricky one, something that we got a balance, but platform investments, investments in platform infrastructure are kind of a slow one. They take a while to pan out, students, especially large-scale dark platforms, and I've seen really successful PMs observe for technology changes or trends in technology, trends in user behavior, that either create an opportunity for their platform to come in and really be a leader or trailblaze, or get the benefits of being a first mover, and in many cases also be aware that it might disrupt some of the capabilities provided by their platform, and really setting them up to make strategic changes or strategic bets, rather than reacting to changes in the macro scale of things. A good example of this that I generally provide people, and I talk to is today, when you log into apps or services, you can use, pick your favorite social media audience, professional networking IDs, and log into these apps and sites. And this is not the case a few years ago. You had to create your profile, go through like these signups, even had extension that allowed you to do this easily. Just can tell you it was a user pain that a lot of end users dealt with it, and now everyone uses this single one-click signup, login with their existing IDs, makes like very, very simple and very friction-free for a lot of these apps to acquire users. But going back to adopt this kind of federated authentication, a lot of the platforms would have had to do deep surgery in the security and authentication stacks. And watching this trend and getting ahead of it would have led a lot of platforms to redo it on the app terms, rather than getting forced into doing it with everyone else on it and reacting to it. This is a kind of macro trend that I always give an example of. Another one would be using Apple Pay or Android Pay on your phone nowadays, which makes payments a single-click twice as well. So watching for these macro trends, how it impacts your platform very, very carefully, watching if it's going to disrupt your platform, some of your platform PMs can do very effectively. The other one is thinking long-term. As PMs, you are constantly bombarded with goals and OKRs and executing on a monthly or quarterly cycle, planning at six-monthly or annual cycles. There's a lot of short-term tactical work getting done. But there's also a need to make sure that you're trading off the short-term goals versus your long-term objectives very, very carefully. And also be very clear about your long-term objectives and articulating that with sufficient depth. A thing that seems really successful for platform PMs too is also lay out the long-term opportunity in the platform space and the platform investments, which gets the product teams and the engineering teams aligned correctly. It helps the creative juices flow out of flowing. It makes sure that a lot of your investments, both the product side and the technical side, is going to accrue towards a lot of your long-term opportunities. The other thing long-term thinking allows you to do is also weigh the macro trends and how it shapes some of the long-term thinking. Do you need to go scurried? Are you headed the right way? Do you need to pivot? Having that view allows you to reflect and control things in a very effective manner. So I think long-term thinking in a platform space is very, very important. Moving on. The next one, and this is a controversial one, is knowing your tech stack. And this doesn't mean you need to know how to write code or traverse a graph. It's not technical hands-on implementation, but it's having enough depth in the technology stack that you're leveraging or working with. What's the architecture? What are the layers? What are the dependencies? What are the constraints that you're working with? What are the constraints that you're dealing with? And bonus points over here would be to really understand working with your technology teams, really understanding what are some of the deep assumptions in the platform, what are some of the deep invariance that are baked into the platform that are hard to change? And what this does, it actually gives you two advantages. One, it helps you ground your conversation with your engineering peers. Big part of your success, and having an appreciation for some of the constraints and some of the challenges that they're working with will help you have effective trade-off conversations, come up with suggestions that help move the ball along, rather effectively, and that you really then use in many cases what I call the cycle type. The other thing it does, it actually allows you to zoom out and think about broad new initiatives, new ideas, and how your platform may require significant surgery to support those things. And what it allows you to do that, if you're convicted it's the right thing to go do, is understand the risks, understand the dependencies, what all needs to get lined up. So teams executing on it are better set up for success. You already know the challenges you're gonna run into when you're breaking some deep founded assumption that's been in the platform for years, gives you an edge rather than finding these things out during execution, which can really hamper progress. So spending time understanding your stack and a good appreciation for how things hang together, I think really goes a long way in helping you as a platform here. The other one is connecting the dots. And I feel this applies for EMS, or probably mid to senior, in the mid to senior band who are progressing to their career or also on the way up ahead of product, where a day to day, PMS are working at breakneck speeds, switching context, switching across multiple initiatives. The medium, like I said, the medium in senior band, you've got multiple problem areas, maybe even multiple product lines you're working with, different set of problems. I find very successful PMS that I've interacted with and I've actually spent time asking them these questions they regularly pause and kind of level up or imagine them floating over their problem space and do a left to right view of what's going on. And this allows them to find patterns that you don't normally see when you are deep in the problem space, but when you zoom out, it gives you the opportunity to look at problems horizontally and come up with innovative solutions or ideas that can end up having tremendous outsize or a compounding effect, leading to tremendous impact. And this is where it might be called to interview different. I've seen people slow down a little regularly. I asked a very successful platform player what he does and his idea was regularly block time off on this calendar to slow down and level up and just spend time ruling on the problem space to come up with new ideas. Not all of them take off, but at least it allows him to have this clarity of thought and approach problems in a refreshed way. And many of those nuggets have helped him achieve a lot of success and a lot of impact through his career. And the last one, and this one is a rather simple one but can have a lot of effect is publishing a platform roadmap. Most outward facing customer facing features you generally put it on the roadmap but I see less of that happening in the platform space. And you can do this in two ways. You can either publish a platform roadmap that's public, everyone gets to see it or you can just do it personally just by yourself even or just at your team level. And what it really does is it forces you to clearly articulate how you're balancing your short term investments versus your long term investments. Some of the tactical work you're doing versus the strategic work that's ongoing and really have an honest conversation on a regular basis on if are these the right things to do. And having a public roadmap puts that really holds your accountable to do this and show your work outwardly. And also just doing it at a personal level just forces you to have that clarity of thought. And I found it personally very interesting to see some of the investments we are making how some of the change around we have changed over time that they may not no longer be relevant or we need to course correct the roadmap a little so that we are headed in the right direction and bringing in that macro worldview in really allows you to keep the team focused both on the short term and the long term. So if you can get into a habit of publishing a platform roadmap even if it's just for your team or for yourself it'll help a lot in driving clarity. But those are the six takeaways just summarizing it again you don't need to apply all of these to your roles you can pick and choose more of them to your situation but these are some of the things I have found personally very useful. One is know your customers well know their customers so really understanding who the end user is and how you can influence that. Watch for macro trends. I generally call the platform investments have a slow burn effect to it. Take a time to land. If something's going to disrupt you watch for it or if you can just have something again take the opportunity. Think long term a lot of platform investments take pay dividends over time. So think long term and then trade off some of your short term investments along with your long term investments. And it's generally a sign if everything is very short term it's generally a sign that it's still maturing but once you start maturing long-term thinking really help you solidify your investments. Understand your tech stack like this is this is both can be daunting if you're not from a technology background but spending the time to understanding your technology stack understanding on engineering team will really help you cut cycle time. For mid to senior band PMs I definitely recommend spending time looking horizontally across your product space horizontally across the problem space in the industry you're working in or the verticals you're working in to find opportunity to connect the dots and where you could have like one plus one equal to three kind of impact. And then publish a roadmap. We do this normally for customer facing features I try and do it for platform features as well and capabilities as well. It is force a level of hygiene and honest conversation with your team obviously doing the right thing and if any course correction is needed it's done in a much more controlled manner. Over that, thank you for your time today and have a good day.