Products and Platforms

A product can be defined as experience(s) or service(s) that are standardized, packaged and delivered for a target user base to meet a specific set of needs — explicit or latent. A chat app, a weather app, image processing tools, spreadhseet applications, search engines, … our lives touch many each day.

Platforms, as understood and prevalent in the tech industry, broadly have three categories:

✓ Internal platforms — their goal is to provide product/feature teams a set of common services through standardized interfaces. Think payments and fulfilment for an ecommerce product, risk & fraud for a fintech offering, specialized types of data storage and access, identity/access/SSO, etc. for pretty much all applications. Their success is determined by the economies of scale, uptime, reliability and ease of integration enabled for engineering teams within a company.

✓ External platforms to extend a product — their goal is to get other companies (ISVs, System Integrators) and independent developers extend a product’s capabilities. Think chatbot platforms, social identity providers, APIs from mapping and video platforms, etc. Success for them is defined by increased distribution and usage of the core product.

✓ Pure platform plays — this category of software exists for others to build-upon. Operating systems, Identity and Access Management systems, all the major cloud providers (also known as platform as a service) fall under this. The greater the number of apps developed on a platform, higher its success.

Is there a transition that products make towards platform-ization? For (1) and (2) usually the journey begins with a product finding product-market-fit and growing usage. For a product’s usage to exceed the scale it can reach organically, it creates extensibility mechanisms that enable other developers to build experiences that augment the core product’s value prop and makes it even more engaging and sticky for users. WeChat’s mini programs is a good example of evolving a chat app to a conversation platform from where users can book cabs, make payments, order food, etc.

Recent trends, at least in the enterprise space, have been to sim-ship platform capabilities along with the product. The level of extensibility and customization that enterprise customers demand can only be served when the core product is extensible through its platform offering.

Originally published on LinkedIn