Platform lesson #10: One ecosystem platform stakeholder at a time

Although platforms can be used purely for internal purposes, many reach a point where they’re opened up to third parties, becoming an ecosystem platform. Ecosystem platforms serve, by definition, two- or multi-sided markets. This means that you have multiple stakeholder groups to support to make the platform successful. When thinking about ecosystem platforms, I often … Read more

Platform lesson #9: Be careful to open up to third parties

Every platform company I’ve worked with would love to open up their platform to third parties and get ‘free’ functionality extensions. Especially the idea of a multi-sided platform where different parties exchange value with each other and you collect a nice slice of each transaction comes across as a highly desirable state of being where … Read more

Platform lesson #8: Instrument your platform for data-driven decisions

William Edwards Demming, the American who helped Japan rebuild itself after World War II, famously said: “In God we trust; all others must bring data.” This is still a lesson most companies haven’t fully incorporated. Once a platform gets a certain amount of traction, the opportunity to make data-driven decisions presents itself. This is incredibly … Read more

Platform lesson #7: Constantly optimize commodity for TCO

In earlier posts, I’ve introduced the Three Layer Product Model (3LPM). Similar to all other software, platforms have three layers of functionality: innovative and experimental, differentiating and commodity. Functionality typically starts as innovative and, when it resonates with customers, becomes differentiating. The differentiating functionality drives sales and market share, causing competitors to develop similar functionality … Read more

Platform lesson #6: Control platform variability

Software platforms by their very nature support multiple products. Typically, these products are used in different contexts and configurations. As a consequence, the platform has to offer variation points that allow each product and customer to use the platform in the way that best suits their purposes. Each variation point then has two or more … Read more

Platform lesson #5: Distinguish customer-unique and customer-first functionality

The idea behind platforms is to share functionality between different products and make it available to as many customers as efficiently and quickly as possible. This is one driver for continuously incorporating new features into the platform. Incorporating new features can be done using a product-first approach or a platform-first approach. In the product-first approach, … Read more

Platform lesson #4: Don’t integrate new functionality too quickly

Any solution aiming to stay relevant needs to continuously integrate new, innovative functionality. The main reason is that functionality commoditizes over time so that if we wouldn’t add new features, the entire product or platform would commoditize and become irrelevant. Commodity software isn’t necessarily useless, as proven by quite a bit of open-source software, but … Read more

Platform lesson #1: Platforms should focus on speed, not efficiency

Traditional thinking is that platforms are about efficiency through reuse. Product teams get a bunch of functionality for free from the platform and only have to build the remaining product-specific functionality. The interesting thing about software reuse is that it’s been extremely successful at the inter-company level. The amount of software that’s being reused through … Read more