AMA: Carta Sr. Director of Product Management, Anton Kravchenko on Platform Product Management

Great question. In short, platform teams mainly focus on serving internal users (commonly developers) with essential building blocks that fast-track development and offer consistency with end-user UX. Let's use Identity & Access Management (IAM) as an example. As a company introduces a new product, the development team behind it will need to ensure users can securely authenticate and manage access. What IAM offers is a standard company-wide engineering framework for how external users (your ...Read More

Build with, not for them. Building 0 → 1: From my experience, a new "Platform capability" that evolves behind a key initiative has a much better chance of creating leverage and driving larger organizational impact. This requires a closely integrated or even embedded team placement with a broader alignment on key outcomes. Building 1 → N: this is an area where you'd often experience a lack of internal buy-in as each team is juggling their own set of priorities. Here, I suggest starting by choosin ...Read More

The collaboration among different teams depends a lot on the platform components my teams are working on. For example, Infra requires a lot of collaboration with finance on costs. In contrast, our Public API Platform requires strong collaboration with Business Development as this is our channel team to partnerships. But commonly, as a Platform PM overlooking multiple areas such as Mobile, Frontend, DX, and APIs, I usually work closely with the following departments: Engineering - I engage engine ...Read More

At Carta, we follow this framework to invent new products and then iteratively transform them into core competencies: Test & Learn: A test is a non-permanent addition to our product designed to prove or disprove a specific hypothesis. Here, we emphasize speed and innovation with sufficient UX. Feature MVP: A Feature MVP is a feature in which we have high confidence of good performance in our product. It aims to achieve enough user engagement to inform how we should iterate on the product. Fe ...Read More

Whether I focus on a cluster of ICPs or individual ICPs usually depends on (I) time constraints and (II) 0-1 vs 1-N product motion. Usually, when I pitch a new idea to my executive team, I like to clearly articulate a big picture using data and trends and then deep dive into individual customer anecdotes. In other words, I combine explore and exploit strategies and limit my research with just enough data to kick off the debate. This allows me to quickly iterate on everyone's feedback and make a ...Read More

First, I start with defining the impact. In some cases, the business could benefit from cost savings, better SLAs, or faster time to market for new products and features. It all depends on the business and market conditions, so aligning with your executive team is the first thing I'd do. Next, I focus on capturing, analyzing, and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data inputs. Personally, I like to meet key stakeholders (PM/EM leads who lead other pillars) to understand their pain points ...Read More

The short answer is that I talk to customers a lot. Going one level deeper, I like to source customer feedback through the following channels: User Interviews (Weekly) - I ensure to schedule at least 2-3 interviews per week with internal or external customers. During these meetings, I take notes and record the conversations, then share the synthesis with my teams. Advisory Board (Monthly) - I find value in nurturing a customer advisory board with a diverse mix of engineering-based seniority, rep ...Read More

Build vs buy is a common PM dilemma. As for my own challenges, a couple of examples come to mind: Support & reliability - at Carta, we use Mandrill as our email service provider (ESP). The service was brought in a long time ago and, over the years, became an unsupported offering from Mailchimp. Problems included downtime, unresponsive support, and no major product updates. When we started to evaluate alternatives, we realized that the cost of change was too high, so we decided to add layers ...Read More