Jan Bosch
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
One company I worked with analyzed the businesses they had tried to build over the years. Their analysis showed that the most successful business inside the walls of an already highly successful company took, on average, 7 years to reach 50 million in revenue. And this was with the entire weight, network and customer base … Read more
Many of the founders I work with are interested in finding a way to become a platform company. Having customers and complementors engage with each other and taking a cut of each transaction is an incredibly attractive concept that anyone in their right mind would love to realize. It feels like a money-printing machine that … Read more
Many entrepreneurs are looking to maintain as much ownership of the company as possible over time. To pay the bills and have some revenue come in, one strategy is to engage in consulting assignments. Of course, some founders are able to go without salary for an extended period of time, but in practice, they often … Read more
The founders I work or have worked with do not only have a problem they’re looking to solve; they also have a set of skills, often built up while working for another company, that they’re looking to bring to bear on that problem. As I learned while working for Intuit, the three key rules are … Read more
