 Hi everyone. Good morning. Good evening. Today we are here to talk about the best practices of platform product management. Thank you, products cool for this wonderful opportunity. Let's dive in. Quickly about me. I'm Mani Kampandian, Senior Product Manager with PayPal for the last eight years, have been working on different platform management products for multiple years now. I started my career with Disha Anko as a software developer, and transitioned into this product management role. I'm very passionate about product management, and it happened by chance. I started loving it. I tried to look for really emerging trends on the fraud management space, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and I really look for those trends to have complete change in the way we interact in the future. Quickly about my personal life, I have been born and brought up in Tamil Nadu, and now with the COVID situation in India, it's really, really hard. I hope things get better pretty soon, and in this particular situation, there are a lot of different customer problems that has emerged, and I hope newer and newer platforms will be built to solve those problems as well. Again, as part of today's topic, let's move on to understand what is a platform first. So platforms, let's call it as industry platforms, to be honest. So industry platforms are though that are visible to the customers. So basically, it can be an innovation platform where the company has created a platform for getting people to leverage that. So it could be AWS. There are lots and lots of companies using AWS today. And then platforms are the real new titans. And in fact, if you look at it, five out of the six most valuable companies are really platform-based. And also the new startup unicorns, at least 60% of them are platform-based ones. So clearly, platform is the way forward to enable more and more product experiences for customers in a scalable way. If you look at the transaction platforms, transaction platforms enable transactions between multiple users. Let's quickly look at how PayPal as a payment network transaction platform handles this network effort, right? So basically, as you all know, PayPal has both buyer and seller or consumer and merchant in the ecosystem. And as long as the consumers prefer PayPal, merchants would really want to put down PayPal as an option during checkout, right? And this continues as a vicious cycle, right? So merchant really wants to put down PayPal as an option. And as soon as more and more people see PayPal as an option in the checkout experience, they would want to be part of the PayPal network. And that's what we call as creating a network effect. And most of these transaction platforms does that and that really helps in scaling up the platforms as well, right? As a definition of platform, we can see that platforms really is a set of technologies or bundle of technologies that can enable the products or the product experiences for the end customers to share data and experiences with one another, right? And then these are really the industry-facing platforms and a lot of companies may specifically focus on a particular purpose. And once it's well-built, that industry platform will look at capturing that particular space. If you look at Twilio, for example, right? Twilio is a platform company which enables the future of communications, right? You can, as a business, you can actually reach out to more customers using phone or using a text, pretty seamlessly using the APIs that Twilio provides. And then it's a great platform to be honest, right? So these are the trends that are emerging and this is exactly the reason why we need to understand how platform product management needs to be done. And I'm happy to be part of the platform product management group now and I want to explain you how it works on the internal platforms as well. Like let's, we have seen the industry platforms. Let's move on to the internal platforms now. So if you look at the broad spectrum of things in a large company or even in a small company, there is a clear engagement of focus on the platform and the platform is all about scalability and reusability, right? So if you look at this particular fictional web services kind of structure, you have a customer growth product management whose primary focus is to improve engagement, bring in more revenue or bring in more customers. And they have a different product line or segment and their organization goals are around, connecting with the customers and understanding which one would work better. In the other side of things, like if you look at the platforms, there are so many different platforms, right? And each of these segments would need the power of these platforms and that's the beauty of it. Like once you build a particular platform, the platform will have its own experience for the end customers. So platform needs to understand how the customers interact with their platform specifically and it's also important for the platform product manager to connect with each of these product lines and understand how do we accumulate these set of use cases and build the platform for the future. So that it can be built in a scalable fashion. And based on the organizational structure in the company, there may be like a different set of platforms that can be there and based on the nature of the business, the kind of platforms you will look at will also be different. And as we saw just in the previous slide, about five of the six companies, the large ones are platform based. And we are moving towards platform based companies in the future, absolutely, right? And this is the exact reason why we also need to understand why creating the right platform experience is important for our end customers and what are the different kinds of best practices, especially for platform product management, right? Yes, so let's move on to the best practices of platform product management from my perspective, from my experience. Happy to learn and share feedback along the way. So please let me know offline if there are other things that you have seen that have worked well, that is not captured here or that could have been better and so on. So the first thing is building a strategy platform vision. So it's all about where you want to go. Like there's a small story where there was a person who was walking down the road and there were two pathways in front of them. And if the person was looking for directions, right? And the other person giving directions was asking, like, where do you want to go? And if you don't know where you want to go, then you can very well take either of those paths, right? So that's where understanding the organization goals and also building the vision very clearly is the most important aspect of platform product management. So if you are looking at a consumer product management, it's like setting up the vision. Similarly, for that customer growth or that particular segment based on those goals, right? So let's look at some of the key aspects, right? So from the platform standpoint, as I said, the kind of big picture that you have to see is absolutely necessary. Because as a platform, you're going to cater to numerous use cases and the number of customers is going to be really, really huge. So the number of use cases that you have to deal with is again, it's extremely high, right? So that's also the beauty of it. You have a big broad picture that will help you to also accumulate information when people are coming to you and then share feedback when people are coming to you. So again, some of the common practices is like clearly understand what is the purpose of the organization and then define those clear KPIs, right? And obviously, when you're looking at a large strategic vision, it's important to understand and make the short-term or long-term trade-offs. We will come to that. So it's also important to understand the competitors, look for competitors with similar platforms. Like if you're looking at identity platform, for example, is there something similar as 2.0, which is the framework that's developing, then it's important to build on top of that particular framework, right? And then make sure you're going towards that direction or be the leader in creating that in the whole ecosystem. One of the important differences is the alignment between business and architecture. It's super critical for platforms to have complete alignment from the business need and the architecture alignment. There are always certain challenges there, but it's important to understand that it's this alignment that will help in scaling up the platform, right? And then understanding the customer's customer, that's another important aspect because you would be involved in so many different meetings with different kind of context. Like people will come in and say, you know, I'm going to go into this market and then develop something. And some may come and say, there is this specific particular authorization issue that I'm trying to fix, or there could be someone coming and saying that, you know, I want to improve the number of net new actors on the platform and I need this platform to support me in doing certain things. So all of those things needs to be baked in. And then we have to figure out which one creates the most impact and come up with that right road map with a clear long-term view. So a couple of scenarios, right? So abuse management platform. Like if you're looking at abuse management platform, it's one of the things that I'm currently working on. So we are looking at building abuse management as a capability across multitude of use cases on PayPal. So there are going to be customers who are looking for promotions and when they are applying for the promotion, we are going to look at whether they are really abusers or they are really good customers or potentially good customers. And then enable them to have a seamless experience when they are really good customers. And if they are probably abusers, tag them and make sure they get the right kind of experience that they are intended to have. So if you look at the applicability of this abuse management platform in itself, right? So the abuse management platform will have its own goals, clearly on how do you define abuse? Well, you know, what are the factors that you need to consider? What are the data elements that you need to collect from the customer? How do you collect them? How do you provide the experience for a good customer or a bad customer? So there's a customer experience element. There is this platform element and so on. But if you look at the use cases, like that could be a customer growth PM looking at net new actors and saying that I'm running this promotion campaign and I need the abuse management platform to support me. And similarly, there could be sellers on PayPal who are sending out invoices. Like what's the intention of those sellers who are sending out invoices? Are they really abusers or trustworthy? It's important to handle that scenario as well, right? So there are also use cases around sending money. Like if a person is sending the money or requesting the money from another person, you know, if they are friends and they know that it's coming, it's all good. But if it's actually an abuse activity, it's important to stop that from happening, right? So those are different use cases and different kinds of customer needs. Some of them would come to you as a platform to enable that. And then when you're building the platform, it's important to have that North Star vision and said those KPIs very clearly, right? Another example could be dispute management as a service. Like dispute management is all about how do you solve the customer's problem after they have interacted with you? Like they have seen an issue and they are looking at can someone help me in solving this problem? And it could be a charge back in the case of transaction again from the PayPal context. If it is a marketplace, like people go to marketplace and say, I am not happy with the product. And it's important to see if we can create a service around it and make it as a platform so that irrespective of whatever is a use case, right? Maybe it's cross-GO, it can be local transactions or it can be a marketplace transaction, it can be intangible transaction. You know, how do we provide that seamless experience and build in that whole dispute management process? And if it is even possible to create as a service for enabling marketplaces to create disputes on PayPal, we have done that. And then also getting the response from customers because there are different kind of customer segments, it's important to understand the personas and build those view, work with them, understand the feedback, all those things still is required. And then building it on the platform for the internal teammates that would be like teammates who are looking at the dispute and making a decision. It's important to understand what their perspective is as well, right? So overall, it's important to clearly have a long-term vision of where this platform is going to stand and what's the purpose of this platform and align it with the company's goals. And from the platform product management standpoint, the key things that are standing out are alignment between business and architecture. It's super important. We cannot do a lot of hacks and it's not going to be scalable. And understanding the customer's customer, if the customer is coming up with, hey, I'm going to increase this net new active, understand who are those customers who are going to come in. It's going to be important. So some of the times you don't have that ability to connect with customers, off customers whole lot, but it's important to empathize and also share the learnings that you've got from the broad spectrum. Yeah, so let's move on to the second option. So it's its balanced approach on prioritization. This is again, one of those best practices that's common, but the way we interpret in the platform product management is going to be slightly different, right? So let's get a view of what are those and then probably see that as well. So clearly, from the platform PM's perspective, there are numerous different types of stakeholders to manage. That's one of the key things to understand, right? So that is obviously the users who are going to use the experience of the platform product management. The platform itself could be an API, which means there are a lot of internal stakeholders than the external ones or it could be a tools, which is like the customers or the users of that would be internal operations team as well, right? So it's important to define who are those stakeholders and what's their goals. And there are going to be customer growth PMs coming from different segments and looking for different aspects. So that also is key from the stakeholder management standpoint. And obviously developers interacting with your own team to make sure they understand where you are coming from and why you are asking to prioritize this over others is super important. I've been in a situation where getting into the details of, hey, this is super important for the business. They may come back and say, hey, this is a problem which is super important to be solved. There is a bug in the platform and we cannot add tech depth, right? And this kind of conversation is healthy as long as we have a clear understanding and common understanding at the end of the discussion. So it's ultimately, how do you decide to solve the pain of the customers, right? It's all about solving problems. So clearly some of the customer growth PMs may be looking for something specific in the short term even though that might impact the platform behavior. That's where it's important to discuss about that and understand the way we can change things and negotiate on getting it built right in the first time. Because there are going to be situations where if we end up adding something that's going to live on the platform for a while and if we are not thinking through this completely then that's going to harm the platform more in the future. One of the other aspect is specific to platform product management. It's all about providing this accurate information in a concise fashion so that anybody who is really looking at integrating with this platform will have a complete knowledge of what they are getting into without even talking to the platform PMs or the platform teams. That's the ideal situation. Nobody will be there at any point in time I hope but there could be some customization that may be required unless there are no customization that are required then the platform documentation and the communication on top of it should be really accurate so that people understand integrate pretty easily. It's primarily for the internal developers. Let's look at a couple of examples, right? Always there are situations where we may need to customize something for someone and it's important for the business. So understanding the business goals, as I said in the previous best practice is clearly the key and there are going to be different stakeholders so we need to make sure the goal of the business is achieved even though we are doing some customizations on the platform. The customizations on the platform should be built in a way that can be leveraged for other partners as well and it should also be modified in a way to pivot on the long-term vision as well because if a biggest partner is really looking for this there are also other customers. Can we build the capability in such a way that it can be extended to other partners as well and other use cases as well in a meaningful fashion? So that really depends on a specific use case, specific problem that we are trying to solve and so on. One of the examples was like Google was looking for integrating with PayPal, we have done that recently there are a few customizations that we did for enabling that to happen in a way that Google really wanted to have. And this particular common problem that we may see in common scenario that we may see all together is all about like whether there are always this partner needs or merchant needs was as I have this platform vision which is long-term and I want to make sure I don't want to change anything there. So one of the examples could be like a partner is looking to change the way the platform behaves for their specific use case. Like how do you make sure money is not given to the end merchant immediately and it has to be based on my signal or something like that. Like this is like how can you build it in the platform and have a plan, right? So because there are going to be timelines there is going to be scope there are going to be only enough resources so there are always challenges in the way we handle things. So we have to deal it with care because the decision that we're making here we also come back and haunt us if we are not making the right decision. So it's take your time, think through this end to end work with your architecture team understand the perspectives of the customer's customer and also make sure you communicate with them often and proactively as much as possible so that people understand why you are making that decision and what's your goal ultimately, right? And that will make sure they have other ways to solve the problem too or you can guide them through the process. So yeah, the next one is execution, right? So obviously only when the product is given to the hands of the customer that's when the network effort, the whole ecosystem is going to get the benefit out of what you were always thinking about, right? So it's all about collaborating to ensure you have a clear way of handling things along the way. So obviously, if you look at the customer need lifecycle, right? It's a full swimming process maybe this one is common and people might have seen this more often. The first one is discovery, like really identify and validate solution approaches, right? So the first one is like understand what's the specific problem that we're trying to solve? It could be an authorization rate for the merchants for example, right? Like how do you solve that art rate for merchants? Then come up with different solutions based on the data, based on the research that you're doing and validate the solution approaches with the broader team. So collaborate with as many stakeholders as possible to understand their perspectives, make sure you have a clear view of what are those solution approaches that would work and have that agreement as you get started. And now there are going to be numerous stakeholders in big companies and also in small companies, right? So you will have to collaborate with different stakeholders and make sure they have their inputs in the way the product has to be built so that you avoid lost-minute surprises. You don't want to be in a situation where you built all the product and you figure out like legally it's not allowed, right? So it's important to talk to the privacy team, understand the inclusion space, understand the legal elements of it and make sure you're building it in the right fashion. So the next part is roadmap planning, right? So if you look at the platform PMs responsibilities, there are always going to be like a support structure for the customer group PMs and that's where it's important to be involved, right upfront as much as possible so that you know what's happening and also you can provide input space on your broad knowledge. And it's important to scope the piece of work that you are completely owning, right? So you really scope the work on what you really own and define the behavior. And if you are really owning the end-to-end experience like because platform itself is getting modified and you are changing the customer experience and so on, it's important to talk to the dependent teams and make sure they are aligned with your common goal that you're trying to achieve. And then along the way, there could be like numerous different inputs that can come in as a product manager. It's important to understand, comprehend the potential use case that can create some of those approaches that we have defined has to be revisited with that additional information, right? So those things are something that we need to really keep in mind. And obviously, we can't have the entire team working on one single program, right? So there are going to be like numerous programs and that roadmap prioritization that we were talking about becomes super important there. And when there are any issues that comes up, it's important to have the reliability of the platform as those important elements and make sure if there are any issues that comes up, how do we accommodate for those in the roadmap? And then the last part is like measuring and monitoring and keep iterating on how do we build the product or the platform in the right fashion as we get to know more things. And we have newer solutions identified. Then those are the aspects that we need to improve. So as a platform product manager, the reliability and availability is critical. So building the product platforms with new capabilities should be of the best quality, right? So because the platforms are going to cater to almost all of the customers, right? So if you are not taking care of the quality, then that's going to be even bigger problem because it's not one segment that's going to be impacted, it's the entire segment. So that's the scale of things that we are looking at from the platform perspective as well. So it's important to remember that when you're building anything. And when you're identifying something that's identified to be a pitfall or a corner use case that comes up and then it's important to be on the pose and understand the kind of issues that has happened, be quick to respond to it, understand what are the implications of it and pivot quickly to the new findings and make sure you are also enabling the team to execute flawlessly because there are going to be team members working on different things that are going to be new dependencies that can be identified along the way. Immediately, it's important to make sure you get that dependency alignment and receive the commitment to start executing on the items based on the company's goals, based on the organization goals, right? So it's important to align on that front as well because each of the teams have their own small capacity and each one have lot of different priorities. So those are the elements you are considering on the execution front. Ultimately, remember that Rome was not built in a day and it was not built by 1%, right? So it's always product managers need a lot of support from numerous teams to deliver on their road maps and only once you build the capabilities that you are really looking to build is when you have an opportunity to delight the customer experience and create that network effect or the platform effect, yeah. Sounds good. Moving on to the last but not the least best practice it's all about learning continuously. So you have to really measure clearly monitor what are the goals that the organization set up, what were the goals for your platform that you set it up along with your internal stakeholders and measuring that on a periodic fashion, right? So let's move on to that. So clearly, for platform PMs, it's mostly the adoption, right? Adoption of the platform is one of the key KPIs. It's also important to understand the key business metrics. So one of those scenarios that I'm mentioning is the managing fraud or the auth rate that you're talking about earlier. So like auth rate is from the merchant standpoint, internally the KPIs of the platform could be like how good the decision is, like how do you measure whether the decision is good or bad? Like you can understand whether the good uses have got a decline because of something incorrect, how do you reduce that from happening, right? And what are the losses that that's happening ultimately, right? Like how do you reduce those losses? So you have a clear KPIs that are well-defined from the organization perspective. And those KPIs should also take into account the adoption of the internal customers or adoption of the end customers. Like if it is a dispute management API, right? How many people use that to respond to disputes, for example? And then also if you're looking at, what are those elements that you need to look at, you need to be really looking at measuring those KPIs continuously and then monitoring them before the product launch, after the product launch and continuously looking at whether the product capability that you have added is providing that intended results. It's also important to document the capabilities very clearly so that people can integrate with us in a cell service fashion. There are going to be numerous stakeholders and getting feedback from them is one of those most important things, right? So you have this experimentation way of understanding how customers are adopting and then you can learn from that, talk to customers, understand the feedback from them and then have a world map identified and so on. Also internal customers who are going to look at customizing the strategies or building those additional layers on top of the platform would be looking at this platform for different purposes, right? How do you accommodate that feedback and learn continuously in the process is one of those key traits for a platform product manager. And also be really open-minded, right? So understand that there are going to be a platform lifecycle or a product lifecycle, some of the hacks that we have added has to move away. And if the platform was built in a way that can accommodate numerous of these cases, that's when it can live for a longer time but some of those capabilities needs to be revisited based on the emerging trends, right? There could be a situation where we wanted to have a platform which can give a specific recommendation for the customers but it would be better for the customers to select their own choice, right? So that becomes a completely different way to look at from the platform perspective and then change the way the platform has to be built for that perspective, right? So that it becomes the platform is built for the newer way of thinking, right? So at the end of the day, platforms needs to be really reusable. It has to be scalable. We are looking at how do we reuse as much as possible and leverage as much as possible. There would be like numerous, numerous stakeholders and multitude of use cases that we have to deal with and understanding the feedback from each one of them from different perspective will help you to really grow the platform and make it even more valuable. Like as long as you're adding more capabilities that are relevant for your platform vision, it makes a lot of sense to accommodate those. And it's also important to say no or define the boundary of your platform very clearly. Otherwise, people may end up adding more use cases and it becomes really hard to take it out in the long run, right? So those are the aspects that you need to consider. And yeah, so from the scenarios perspective, right? You are going to have a periodic review with the team. There's going to be a business review or a quarterly business review, monthly business review that you may have with your internal stakeholders, with your partners or end merchants, talking about, hey, how has been your loss rates? How has been your fraud trends that has emerged in the recent past? And these are the recommendations or suggestions that you would recommend to have on your platform. And these are the things that we are doing on our platform to accommodate. And that helps us to keep ourselves on our toes to understand the emerging trends and handle or build those right capabilities in the platform. So with that, now I want to also share some of the, good references for further information. Feel free to use these links. I hope this state will also be shared right after this meeting for the product school team. And thank you again for the wonderful opportunity. I really enjoyed building this platform products and happy to share my insights. Feel free to reach me over through LinkedIn or any of the other channels that you have. Again, thank you product school for the opportunity.