Jan Bosch
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A key challenge for any software product is quality. Before we can do anything to experiment with customers and improve the product, we need to make sure that the product does what it’s supposed to. Although no software is free from defects, there being too many of them hurts the perception of the product and … Read more
The traditional view on platforms is one where the platform provides generic functionality used by multiple products in a portfolio and family. These products can then simply take the platform as a lego brick and build their product-specific functionality on top of it. Like software from external providers, you simply integrate the platform as a … Read more
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
