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

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: Understanding how your work connects to the larger company goals and how the business makes money. Finding a metric that is leading not lagging. If the metric star ...Read More

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 prioritiz ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More