AMA: Doppler Principal Product Manager, James Heimbuck on Platform Product Management

When thinking about the user input when prioritizing (amongst many inputs) there are some questions to answer. Here are some, but not all, of the ones I think about when new requests come my way. * What is your customer (the person or group using the platform) trying to do or solve for and why? * How is that thing your customer is building solving the end user need? * How does that contribute to the overall goals for the company? With these in hand for all the requests coming your way you an prioritize amongst those for what really will impact not just your internal users but the end customers and drive business results. You may even find that there are efficiencies and improvements you can drive for the end users that your customers have not surfaced to you.

The exact metrics you collect and want to move can vary based on your circumstances. For some teams it may useful to count how many transactions are flowing through platform, for some latency in responses to the platform, for others actual money flowing through. No matter what your platform does the hardest parts of tracking KPIs are: 1. Understanding how your work connects to the larger company goals and how the business makes money. 2. Finding a metric that is leading not lagging. If the metric starts to move in the wrong direction it means you will miss your goals but you have time to correct. So take the time needed to understand how the platform connects to larger goals and think about what is a leading metric. Do not worry if it's not quite right the first, second or even fifth time. By continually reviewing and questioning the data you will continue to learn and find the right thing.

Hopefully there are some shared goals and a company or product vision to align your work to and if not you may need to write your own vision for the platform. For example if you were working on a platform that was driving a patient care portal with a 5 year vision to connect users to providers that answer questions within 5 minutes you probably would not focus on a request to integrate with fitness scheduling software but instead focus on how do we build the communication tools that will provide those answers from providers. It is also helpful to keep that list of priorities public and with the reasoning (Why are we doing this?) public as well. This gives visibility to other teams asking for something where their request might land if they have an estimate of the impact it will make.

Platform teams can be very data driven if they have instrumented and are gathering good metrics but you have to get out of the office and get some qualitative data too! Go talk to your customer who is often a coworker. Grab time with developers on those teams to talk about what they are working on and why. What can't they do for their customers and think about how the platform can solve or make those problems go away before they get to them. The only thing to watch out for is over indexing on a small number of users. See if the data backs up the problem being described to you or if it has to do with how that team or user is trying to use the platform.

Before thinking about the possible solutions/features we could build it is important to make sure that the problem is the right one to be focused on right now. There may be times that the biggest problems are just not solvable right now, or that the known best solution would take more time than customers are willing to wait for any solution even the best one. The best way I have found to balance this need between big long term improvements and small quick wins for the customers with with a RICE score. You can search the internet to get more information and I will not go into a primer here but will call out some traps I have run into when setting up initial RICE scoring and keeping it up to date. * Make sure you consider the timeframe of the scores. For reach consider a set timeframe of 3 to 6 months after implementation what is the possible reach, not total possible reach ever. * For platform teams consider standardizing on the end user reach and avoid the temptation to say "all our users would benefit". If a team with 1M Monthly Active Users is asking for an improvement for a particular user segment that is only 10K then the reach is 10K not 1M. * Tie the impact to your overall goals. If your goal for the year is to speed up the response time of the platform then consider measuring that as the impact. Projects that have a minimal impact or would slow down the platform have lower impact scores. * The hardest part is the estimating effort. Think really hard about the projects and encourage your team to do the same. Compare and Contrast projects and debate if two things that deliver different impact would really take the same amount of time. * Do not be afraid to update scores when you learn more. If you have low confidence about something figure out how you can gain some amount of greater confidence quickly but know that you will never get to 100% and that is ok. With that data in hand you can make an informed decision about which projects get you a fast ROI and move the platform towards your longer term goals.